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David vs Goliath

Leadership

I failed but emerged stronger from the experience  

IbyIMD+ Published 21 November 2022 in Leadership • 7 min read • Audio availableAudio available

Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm’s dreams of glory were crushed in a David and Goliath battle with Mark Zuckerberg, but he firmly believes that failure can be a springboard to success if managed well.

Driven by economic changes wrought by the pandemic, entrepreneurship has boomed across the world’s major economies in the past couple of years.

There has been a cultural shift, too: society now worships at the altar of entrepreneurship — at least judging from news websites, case studies and social media, which are awash with success stories and hashtags that romanticize the life of the founder. The creators of multi-billion-dollar companies, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the late Steve Jobs, have become the rockstars of the business world.

Society has a success fetish. But rarely does the harsh reality of being a founder receive enough attention: the setbacks, problems, disappointments — and the inevitable failures. While Instagram and TikTok make heroes of risk-taking, the flipside of that — the high failure rate — is still taboo. The danger is that this creates a false impression that being an entrepreneur is easy. It is not. Understandably, few entrepreneurs…

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