I was reading a recent post by Anita Campbell in her new Small Business Success Center that discussed the book Bounce.  The post is about confidence and failure and led me to read the book. 

Bounce is an interesting and different book because of it focuses on business failure.  Entrepreneur Barry Moltz discusses his failures as well as the failure of others and points out that success and failure both are normal aspects of business life.  He describes Bounce as: 

"...the process of bounding back, of moving forward, falling back, and shooting ahead again, and through all that, building up and then drawing on personal reserves of energy."

Two points in the book jumped out at me.  The first is failure sometimes happens no matter how good someone is or how prepared they are.   

I think this lesson is especially important in times of economic difficulty.  The next year will see many small businesses fail due to the economy.  And some of these will be extremely well run firms that fail for reasons beyond the control of the entrepreneur.

Another interesting point Moltz makes is that luck often plays a major role in success.  As a long time tech industry participant, I've seen this happen many times.  I've also personally benefited from business luck.

As Moltz describes the key is to maintain confidence in failure, humility in success and to move forward intelligently in either case.