From Setback to Success Business Recovery in the USA and Canada

You're asking the wrong question because entrepreneurs have a unique mindset. Your question comes from society as a whole and how most people deal with loss and setbacks.An entrepreneur is different because they don't see things the same way everyone else does.

First, let me explain how we use words. A lot of people use the word "entrepreneur" to mean a business owner or the starter of a new company.If your business fails, how do you deal with it? That's not the question.

For entrepreneurs, failure isn't a setback it's just something that happens.

As you go through life, you will fail sometimes. Failures teach us something. Failures show that you shouldn't keep trying to do something.This makes someone who likes to take risks feel good. To feel better. We don't have to waste time and money on things that don't work anymore. We can move forward in a better way.A business owner, who wants and possibly needs success to make a living, is not the same. The entrepreneur isn't trying to start a business and make money. That might happen naturally to people who are naturally creative, but that's not who they are.

Entrepreneurs look for ways to make things better all the time, and they usually can't help themselves. There will be a lot of failures because if the thing in question could be easily or clearly made better, it would be.When I finished my Master's degree and started applying to Ph.D. schools, it was one of the first big turnoffs in my life.All of the Ph.D. programs I applied to that first year turned me down. I sent my resume to several good schools and one "stretch" program, but nothing came back. Nope. Nothing.

I wasn't used to being turned down that way! That's why I worked at a book shop for a year. I kept looking into different programs in different places all through the year. I stopped focusing so much on making my application fit certain schools and started focusing more on making it fit faculty members at those schools who were studying the same kinds of things I was. I changed a lot about the application letters and started from scratch. Even though it was a loss, it wasn't the end of the world.

How most people deal with loss and setbacks.

When I finished my Ph.D., I had a similar delay. In my first year looking for work, I didn't get any interviews for tenure-track jobs and barely any other jobs. In the US, there aren't many jobs for people with Ph.D.s in writing. My postdoc was for a year, and the following year I took a visiting professorship at Gonzaga University for a year. I worked very hard to avoid becoming an adjunct.Since I wasn't Catholic but rather Protestant, I liked working with kids from that faith background at Gonzaga, which was a Jesuit college. I chose to change my approach while I was at Gonzaga.

So, when I looked for a Ph.D. the following year, I made sure that my search and application included more religious schools and colleges in rural areas. I grew up in the country, so I didn't need the glitz of a big city. I was also pretty happy in more traditional settings than many of my peers. Also, most of my dissertation study was on religious themes in medieval literature. Lastly, when I was fresh out of high school, I joined mission groups run by the Methodist church. All of these things could be good for a Christian college.So, after three years of looking for work, I finally got a tenure-track job at the college where I now teach, and I've been there for over twenty years.

When something doesn't work my basic approach isn't to change my strategy completely.

Instead, I try again with a few small changes to see if that works. Most of the time, I don't give up until I've failed for more than a year or two.A lot of people have problems and hurdles in their lives. How one gets over problems and bounces back from them. People who do nothing but sit around are normal and have to deal with the results. Everyone has a different level of ability to face problems head-on. Some people skip over them and find another way to briefly solve the problem. Things take longer sometimes, and we have to wait for the right time. We shouldn't be sad or unhappy until then because each problem is a tiny part of our lives and not the whole. In the meantime, we might have to put up with the pain.

While most problems go away over time, some problems will always be there, and we need to learn how to live with them and change to life as a result.It's hard to accept that we sometimes fail, but it's the only way we can learn and grow. It makes us smarter the second time around, but not many people do it.

From your point of view, losses are different. Is your goal to make your wish come true or to get there quickly? I guess both are true, but the first one is more important. In the long run, you'll wish you hadn't given up because of a failure. You would have made it happen by then. What you think of as a failure is probably a lesson you need to learn, something important for your journey, no matter how close you thought you were to winning.You can get what you want if you quit seeing yourself as a victim and start seeing yourself as a winner, someone who doesn't take "no" for an answer and is focused on finding solutions.