Padraic O’ Maille gave a talk on last Monday at Open Coffee Galway at 091 Labs. In his talk Padraic spoke about failing in Ireland and the great shame attached to it.
It was summed up by an Open Coffee Galway member saying, “failing in Ireland is like going to prison here, once you have finished your sentence in prison no matter the length of it – it’s actually a a life sentence – as everyone in Ireland knows everyone and the shame continues.” No one likes to fail a project, a business or a relationship but sometimes despite every effort things still fail.
As Padraic O’ Maille said – it’s acknowledging what’s happening and moving on – rather than wallowing around in the failure and getting stuck in a rut. With funding difficult to get and jobs scarce on the ground with many people deciding to emigrate, surely it’s time for attitudes to change towards business failures here in Ireland?
What we need to do is re-define what failure means – for example one definition of failure is “an event or task that does not accomplish its intended purpose”. Padriac O’Maille quoted Padraic O Ceidigh “the only failure is not to try.” I think this is an important version of the definition of failure. Failure is really a mindset, how does your mind perceive failure? Failure is part of success and the closer you get to success the most failure you will have behind you, the important thing to note here is that you must learn from your failures in order to make progress. Here is a quote from Thomas Edison “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”
One thing I have notice about these people at is that their mindset is very different than the average Irish person, they are prepared for failure, they are not quite sure what lies ahead of them, but they have taken the most important first step. They are a diverse and open group of individuals with amazing ideas and a will to succeed sharing their experiences and knowledge.
