I’m not a big fan of gossip. I just look at it as a big waste of time. Even though I’m not that interested, I’m not oblivious to the fact that it drives discussion among many people. Most of the time, when gossip takes over, I just become a fly on the wall. The juicy story, or denigrating someone for the sake of making myself feel better, is just useless to me. However, what is interesting to me is the interaction between those involved in the story-telling.

It usually starts out like this … “Did you hear about Joe? He lost $3 million in that deal. What an idiot …”. And so it goes. The others join in to tell you how they warned him about it, point to the many failures that Joe has had or discuss how they would have done the deal differently. The conversation starts to make everyone sitting around the table feel pretty good about themselves for the next 10 minutes. It moves on and nobody is the wiser for what just happened and the opportunity that was lost. The opportunity that I am talking about is the ability to understand that failure is a great thing.

I tend to think of Joe’s failure in another way. He probably learned one hell of a lesson by losing $3 million. And to be honest, he was probably pretty successful in the past to be in a position to lose that $3 million. Some of the greatest fortunes on the planet have been made as a result of lessons learned by entrepreneurs failing time and again, until they finally figure it out.

When we take a risk, we are acknowledging the possibility of failure. Instead of back-room gossip, we should be celebrating those that risk their neck to become successful. The lesson in failure that I think this region can benefit from is the understanding that without failure, there is no change. And at its core, change can be an amazing catalyst towards achieving groundbreaking success. And therein lies the rub. Changing our mindset as a region will propel us to heights we never could have imagined. 

Economically speaking, the past is in the past. We need to accept that an increased volume of failure means success is just around the corner. We constantly yearn for the past greats of Eastman Kodak, IBM, GE, Xerox, and others. Yet, until recently, little had been done to truly drive a renaissance of the business community. We must understand that at this very moment many more are trying to build the next great company right here in upstate New York. It will happen — period, end of story. It will happen in multiple occurrences. It’s just going to take some time. Over the next 10 years, we’ll probably have a front row seat to a lot failure … and that’s a good thing. No disrespect to George, but one day we’ll forget all about that Eastman guy. 

Kyle Blumin is an entrepreneur in residence at Syracuse’s StartFast Venture Accelerator. He is a Syracuse native and serial entrepreneur with three successful exits in diverse industries. Contact him on Twitter at @kyleblumin