You don’t know, what you don’t know — What failure taught me about success

Growing up in a typical working-class family, in a council estate in Dundee, Scotland, there was never much talk about money…other than the lack of it, and it certainly wasn’t something my mum and dad would talk about in front of me, or my brother and sister.

In the late nineties, early 2000s, I took my first steps into entrepreneurship, starting my own business having been a relative success in the same industry as an employee. Fast forward a couple of years, I had three failed businesses to my name and was at a pretty low ebb.

By chance I caught the end of an episode of the Oprah Winfrey show on TV, where she was interviewing Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad Poor Dad, I went out and bought the book and started my education. It wasn’t until reading this that I realised I knew nothing about how money really worked, about debt, and leverage, and taxes, and investment. It was only at this point that I figured out why my earlier businesses had failed.

It was only through failure that I learned how to be successful, and my only regret is that I didn’t get in the game and fail faster. I simply didn’t know, what I didn’t know, but failure led me to face that shortcoming.