I really believe one of the most important qualities of a successful entrepreneur is acknowledging and accepting mistakes. If you are going to start a business, or run a business, or grow a business, you will make mistakes. It comes with the territory. You have to deal with uncertainty all the time, you have to make decisions quickly, and you won’t always be right.

Some people can’t live with mistakes. They plague themselves about them. They manufacture intricate stories about how it wasn’t really a mistake. They get so afraid of making them that they don’t do anything. They are constantly on the defense.

Don’t let that be you. Keep your eyes open. You’ve made mistakes, you’ll make more of them. Embrace the mistake, take long enough with it to catalog in your mind what you did wrong and what you’ll do differently in the future, and then let it go.

If you can’t live with mistakes, keep your day job.

Perhaps it’s not a mistake that the “business mistake” category in this blog has 116 posts — not counting this one. And I love John Caddell’s mistake bank blog posts at themistakebank.com.

(image: opensourceway via Flickrcc)

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