Are you scare of making the biggest mistake of your life? Do you have choices you just can’t make because you are petrified of what would happen if it doesn’t go right? I have made the biggest mistakes of my life over and over again. (It’s not the same mistake just that I have different choices in different stages of my life and it seems like I have always made the wrong one.)

When you’ve made them you know it, those are the moments where your heart skips a beat, your body temperature rises and start to sweat, you get dizzy, and your stomach gets weak,. These are moments where it forces you to re-evaluate your life, reality, and self worth. If you do not know what I’m talking about then you have not really taken a risk in your life. Today I realized that these failures are necessary to grow and to succeed.

I define failure as when what you plan does not go the way you expect it to. Or more specifically the benefit or what you got out of it is less than what you invest or put into it. (Sounds quite emotionless for such as traumatic event you think.)

I was and still am petrified of making decisions or taking actions where I do not know the outcome and where the outcome can cause me a lot of hurt. I realize today these failures are not only necessary but are not as bad as we think. We are looking at it the wrong way. We think failure is discrete such as if we start a clothing line and show it to 10 stores and 100 people and none of the 10 stores carry the line and none of the 100 people buy the line then we are a failure. The end.

But failure like life is continuous, it does not end at any moment or event, it continues on. You learn from the failure, you get feedback from the 10 stores and the 100 customers. With the feedback and knowledge you learn and develop and you go to the next 10 stores and the next 100 customers. Then you go to the next and the next and next until you get it right. If you look at it this way you never fail, you just learn until you succeed.

I have made many wrong decisions in my life. And I realize last night I made one of the biggest mistakes with the JUZD line. It’s the pricing. JUZD shirts are priced at $100 each. I have been told many times that the price is too high by everyone from buyers to consumers to family and that’s what dogs are probably telling me when they bark. With a lower price (sub $80) my opportunities to get it into stores increase a lot. It also makes it easier for customers to try a new line. And there are an abundant of other reasons. Life would have been a lot easier. But I am here now and I can learn and fix my mistake. I will be working on a small collection of bamboo shirts with lower price tags, looking to hit the market in Spring 2010.

Understand that when you try something new odds are you will get it wrong. How did I really know that setting the price at $100 would put me back so much. Heck I didn’t even know a single thing about the fashion industry when I started.

Looking back everything that I am good at such as baseball, marketing and selling, promoting, dodgeball, math, and even design I sucked at in the beginning. Yes even design. Some of my first designs were horrible. The idea of people being prodigies at anything without hard work is a myth! I was below average in everything I ever tried compare to other beginners. Only difference is that I kept working and working and working at it till I got better. I remember when I first started playing baseball I was really bad, year after year I would get teased by all the other kids. But I kept at it and after a few years instead of being the last kid to be picked for a team I was first. I can still remember that very moment and the emotions that filled me.

When a kid fails at something we tell them to try harder. But as adults when we fail we just give up. Why is that? Why do people stop achieving when they graduate from school and just give up at the first sign of failure?