After I spoke about borrowing money to invest in a factory, someone asked whether I had been afraid that it would fail. Yes, I have felt fear many times. But there was another part of the answer: that investment did fail for me.
I lost the money I had invested, and the obligation to repay the loan remained. I do not want the story of taking a chance to leave out what happened afterwards.
I entered a business I did not understand
That was the lesson I drew from the experience. The idea had not been my own. I believed in it and tried it, but I had entered a business I did not understand well enough.
An idea can sound convincing. Someone else can believe strongly in it. Neither replaces my own understanding of the business I am entering. Looking back, that mattered more than simply asking whether I had been brave enough.
Fear and judgement are different questions
In the video, I mentioned Susan Jeffers’s Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. The idea I wanted to share was that feeling afraid does not automatically have to stop a considered decision.
I also spoke about thinking clearly before acting. My failed investment makes that distinction concrete: moving through fear did not protect me from a mistake. I still had to understand what I was doing and accept the consequences when I got it wrong.
I see that loss as part of my own journey because I took a lesson from it. That does not make borrowing or losing money a necessary step for anyone else. What I want to carry forward is the responsibility to acknowledge a mistake and change how I approach the next decision.
Original social post · 2026-10-19