This post was most recently updated on September 19th, 2017

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Long ago, my friend was involved in a startup. It made custom tees for colleges, schools and corporates.

It was his dream to work for a startup related to tees and was now working for one of them.

He was very excited. He worked there for one year.

But after one year, the startup failed. It failed to gain new customers, it failed to innovate, it failed to make customers happy, it failed to fulfil the required orders on time.

Other startups in the same category were better in all aspects and hence, it failed to maintain it’s edge among the industry competitors.

My friend, who was extremely delighted before was equally devastated now for the failure as he had to leave his job and join another startup.

When I asked him about the reason for the failure of his startup, he gave me many reasons all of which sounded me as an excuses than real reason.

Why excuse?

Because the reasons that he gave me were…

No one supported me.

It might be true. He must be innovative and giving good suggestions but I decided to find out why no one supported him.

I asked him, “Did you had good relationships with your coworkers?”

“Not at all”, he said. “I was smarter than everyone else there. I tried to explain them that my suggestion was good than theirs but no one listened.”

Did you see the mistake he made here?

He was trying to prove he was right and that’s totally fine but by proving others wrong? That’s a terrible way to prove yourself right.

No one will believe you.

If you first let them implement their idea and it fails, they are more likely to implement your idea.

Moreover, who knows their idea might be better? You’ll never know unless you implement.

I was not ready

What? But you just said that you were giving god suggestions for improvement?

“Yes I was but when I was offered for promotion and aditional responsbility, I denied. I didn’t felt like I could manage the team.” He said.

I just asked him one question after this.

Do you know the reason they gave you additional responsibility?

He didn’t speak a word after that.

It was difficult

You know what is not difficult?

Sleeping all day and dreaming.

But what do you accomplish sleeping and dreaming all day? Nothing.

My friend told me it was difficult. But it was his dream job. If it’s really your dream job, you’ll do anything to solve the problem and difficulty and this will make your work even more interesting.

Every career is difficult. And I am sure he’s gonna find his new job even more difficult.

But what makes you success is going in all even after difficulties.

He was not ready to face the difficulties hence, had to face the consequence.

I had less time.

My friend told me he had less time to execute on things.

I asked him whether he spend more than required time on his job as his company struggled to survive.

Why should I work more than I get paid for? He said.

Of course you should not work whole day but when it comes to saving your company from going bankrupt and losing the job you love, working a little extra doesn’t hurt. It might save your career sometimes.

Just think about that.

Circumstances were not good

As the company struggled to survive, few major competitors showed up with major funding and huge marketing budget.

Hence, the management panicked and made some few key decisions which were not good for the company in long run.

Were only circumstances bad or there were other reasons?

No doubt there were other competitors but not giving enough time, not getting along well with the co-workers, not taking the responsibility and all the reasons mentioned above were only the excuses he made to justify his failure.

Are you making same excuses to justify your failure?

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