She says that had she not experienced the failure, she might never have gone on to write one the worlds’s most popular series of books.

JK Rowling’s most memorable quotes, taken from the video, include

I talk about the benefits of failure – simply because failure means a stripping away of the inessential – I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into the only work that mattered to me – the one arena in which I truly belonged – I was set free…

it is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautious you might as well have not lived at all – in which case you have fail by default.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from set backs means that you are, everafter, secure in your ability to survive.

You will never truely know yourself until tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift and it is worth more than any qualification won.

Rock bottom was the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

What can entrepreneurs learn?

Firstly, failure is a part of life and a part of business life. It might be small – you missed out on a contract or sale. Or it might be bigger – your business fails. It might affect your marriage and it affects your finances and the car you drive (or perhaps, for a few years, you just walk).

Secondly, to avoid failing, means taking no risk at all – so means could never achieve anything thing and therefore is failure by default.

Thirdly, having experienced failure, whether small or great, the opportunity is to use it to strip away the inessential parts – to know yourself and focus on what you do brilliantly.

Only when you know what you can do brilliantly can you truly be successful.

Hence, failure is the rock on which all future innovation and long lasting success is based – just as JK Rowling said.
Thirdly,

I am using parables – or stories – to express the ideas about business which will form the basis for this blog and the subsequent book Rags to Wreckages … to Riches.

Lots of people are asking me why, or expressing scepticism that it is worth writing business parables. So let me explain why…

Parables are used to teach and change us. They reach beyond the mere logical or reasoned understanding to touch our hearts and our emotions. Perhaps parables are a little like the picture above, they stir us up and allow each of us to see what we need to see.

Our actions are mainly based in our emotional thoughts and responses are only occasionally driven by logic, although we might like to think otherwise. This does not mean we are unthinking, but that we tend to think with our hearts first and

foremost and usually engage our rational mind later. After the event rational thinking is usually in the form of worry and is often more of a hindrance than a help.

The fact that we think emotionally explains many things including why stock markets are famously driven by the emotions of fear and greed despite the many maths experts attempting to reduce it all to a calm irrefutable logic.

Likewise great entrepreneurs and investors alike learn to develop and act on their instinct and not just logical deduction.

Therefore, for any business book to be successful – and by that I mean it inspires you to make changes in how you run your business or investment life – then it must speak to your heart. It must stir you up so that you emotionally buy into the decisions and actions that you must embrace if you wish to be successful.

In using parables, I don’t claim to be unique or original. In fact the world’s best selling book the bible – uses the parables of Jesus to teach. When asked why Jesus uses parables we are told

Though seeing, they do not see;
Though hearing, they do not hear or understand

and

You may be ever hearing but never understand;
You may be ever seeing but never perceiving.

For when people’s heart’s have become hardened,
They hardly hear with their ears,
And they have closed their eyes
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
Understand with their hearts

In writing business parables for Rags to Wreckages and speaking to business owners and investors I’ve been told that the advice they contain is ‘common sense but rarely considered because they it is so obvious’

So the challenge for us as entrepreneurs and investors is not that we don’t know what needs to be done, but that it is a supremely harder to do it than to talk about it.

Many times our business lives become too complex with a constant barrage of new opportunities and risks, from social media to finance and leverage, such that we lose sight of simple common sense actions that we need to take or focus on.

The aim of Rags to Wreckages is not to lay out new management theories or grand business ideas. We’ve had enough of those already in the past twenty years. Instead, its aim is to reignite our understanding and perception of ourselves our business and investments more clearly and most importantly to do this with our hearts as well as our minds.

For if we see with our hearts, then we perceive and we can act.

This is why I have write these business and investment stories and experiences in parables and then to explain the meaning and implications those stories.

My desire is simple. That the parables will lodge themselves somewhere in your heart and so give you a framework for dealing with the decisions you need to make now and will need to make in the future.

I hope that you avoid the mistakes that I have made without having to repeat those mistakes yourself. If this book can succeed in that goal, then it would have achieved all that I had hoped for.

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You can download and read the first chapter by subscribing in the right hand bar. I’ll be added more parables and stories as time goes and will send those out to anyone subscribed…   >>>>

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