Window of Opportunity

CELEBRATING ACHIEVEMENTS IS one of my favorite things to do. Over the last seven years, we’ve crowned 42 winners of the Women in Wide Format Awards, and I have the honor of sharing their success stories with you. They are aspirational and motivational. Take some of this year’s winners, for example: Tami began her business in her attic; today she’s in a 5000-foot facility with 11 employees and 10,000 clients. Abby started her career in the copy machine industry and is now considered the go-to resource for digital print. Carmen was an employee for 12 years before becoming a business partner.

As much as we talk about success (the word is used 13 times throughout the article), we rarely talk about failure.

How do you view failure? We asked this question in a recent Brain Squad survey. The multiple-choice options were:

• As an opportunity for improvement
• As a devastating setback
• As a way of life, it seems, these days
• As something to be avoided at all costs

Eighty seven percent of respondents chose option A. No one chose B.

Behind these women’s stories are most certainly moments of failure. Probably lots of them. But I’d like to think the reason they’re so successful today is because they view failure as an opportunity for improvement. They understand that learning from your mistakes allows you to grow.

Let’s talk more about our mishaps and defeats. Take the October Brain Squad survey to share a time where you failed and what you learned from it. Maybe you never processed what that failure meant. This is your opportunity for improvement.