Three Lessons From Losing Business to COVID

Alongside design work, he had built an import business from Europe — until COVID stopped the world. Lockdowns severed the trade at its root; the business he had built was finished. His life's greatest setback. But he converted it into three lessons, written plainly in his essay.

One: buy-and-sell work rests on replaceable relationships, fragile to external change. Two: dealing in products anyone can source ends in a battle of capital and price — unwinnable. Three, the deepest: fighting outside his own strengths was itself the greatest failure. Note what he did not do — end the story with "because of COVID."

The pandemic was merely the trigger; the structural weakness predated it, he dissected. Blaming external causes brings comfort and zero learning. Only those who dissect failure as a flaw in their own design can seal that flaw in the next venture. Is your latest failure dissected — or still someone else's fault?

What do you work for?