“An art” is a poem by Elisabeth Bishop, which comes in handy when an entrepreneur sees his e-commerce go down the drain. It's a terrible time that obviously breeds depression. But it's not the end of the world.
Here is what Elisabeth reveals to us, in two stanzas:
The art of losing isn't that hard to master
So many things seem full of intent to be lost/
That your loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day/
Accept the mishap of losing your door keys/
The time wasted uselessly
The art of losing is not that difficult to master.
In fact, defeats can teach more than victories. Losses are, in this perspective, an opportunity for the e-commerce entrepreneur to acquire experience that will be useful in other situations.
Those 10 hours of essential experience needed to transform an ordinary online store into an outlier online store should also include experiences with failures, losses, and projects that didn't work out.
One of China's richest men, the founder of e-commerce group Alibaba, Jack Ma, knows what this is all about. Before becoming a billionaire, Ma said (in an interview during the 2015 World Economic Forum) that:
– Was rejected in more than 30 jobs;
– Was rejected at KFC (where they interviewed 24 people and hired 23);
– He was rejected 10 times at Harvard.
In other words, before becoming a billionaire, Ma learned to be rejected, to take risks and to lose. His experiences served them as intensive resilience training.
Entrepreneurship is full of overcoming stories like this. Here are some very famous ones:
– Cyndi Lauper, before her success with “True Colors” in the 1980s, was part of a band called Blue Angel, which went bankrupt.
– Eucatex, one of the largest companies in the civil construction sector in the country, went into bankruptcy in 2003, but turned around in 2004, when its executives saw the opportunity and invested in wood recycling, which saved the company.
– Before founding Disney, Walt Disney had a film and animation company that went bankrupt in 1922.
So, if you are going through a bankruptcy process right now, know that – to paraphrase Elisabeth Bishop – losing an online store, although it seems, is not a disaster, but an opportunity to accumulate experiences that will serve you to create an e-commerce outside of series in the future.
