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Victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat

By Peter Windatt

BRI Business Recovery & Insolvency

WHILE the late Malcolm Forbes, owner and editor of Forbes magazine (created by his father) isn’t an obvious candidate for someone you might imagine has known defeat, his words, this article’s title, hold true and they follow on neatly from a blog I’ve commented on recently.

Our very own Richard Branson, perceived by many to have an unerring Midas touch, has had some wrinkles along the road to his undoubted success.

A good friend who passed away recently, far too young, wrote cover sleeve notes on the UK edition of a book The Midas Curse which looks at how the children of the super-rich can struggle to handle their family wealth and how many follow the UK model of ‘clogs to clogs in three generations’ or, in the US, ‘shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves’.

Handling defeat, or mistakes, positively is the core subject of many books and articles – hence the blog I responded to. My observation on a post ‘How to talk about failure with confidence’ was that, as insolvency practitioners, we are inevitably dealing with people whose hopes and ambitions haven’t, in most cases, yet been realised. It is usually still too raw and too real for any lessons to then be taken on board or learned from.

However, a recurring observation still rings true – on your death bed it is the things you didn’t try in life that you most regret rather than the things you did.

It isn’t the number of times you are knocked over that matters – it is the number of times you get up. If your business is feeling the pressure and you would like a critical friend to talk to, BRI Business Recovery and Insolvency in St. James can offer more than tea and sympathy. Call 01604 754352 to have a free, no obligation meeting with one of our advisers.

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