Failing is Important
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original”
- (The sadly late) Sir Ken Robinson
”Failure is the most likely outcome… most new products will fail in the market even if competently executed.”
- Alberto Savoia (Director of Engineering, Google)
“Anyone thinking rationally just wouldn’t do it”
- Rory Sutherland (Advertising & Behaviour Guru)
The statistics are not encouraging. Most new ideas, ventures, products, projects fail. They don’t work, they don’t get enough or the right attention or people simply don’t want them.
The difference between how people think about failure is likely a key differentiator between those who fail and stop and those who fail but go on to succeed.
I believe it can be broken down to a simple difference between ‘Failure’ and ‘Failing’.
Failing is inevitable, failure is a choice.
From the hugely talented Michelle Rial and her funny but insightful books:
Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame and a super talented maker of things) once said in an interview to “remember when we’re talking about failure, we don’t mean turning up late and drunk to your kid’s birthday party, we mean something not quite working the way we wanted it to or thought it might”.
He’s completely right, and I’ve found it helpful to expand his language to create a distinction between “Failing” an action word, an activity, something not yet ended and “Failure” the end state. I am a failure. Period.
Failing is therefore an essential part of the learning process, if we don’t fail it’s because we were lucky and luck never lasts. You can’t avoid it, failing (the verb) is just part of the process. But failure (the noun) on the other hand is different. You can avoid failure by always trying to learn from what went wrong, positive iteration or “failing forward” as it’s known in Silicon Valley.
You do that by asking yourself three simple questions:
What just happened? Lots of people don’t even notice when things aren’t going well.
What might be causing it? Look inside and outside, maybe it’s the environment or maybe it’s you.
What do we do now? Create a plan and try it. (Yes of course it won’t work, but failing forward is the aim here)
I find it helpful to think about it (and most things to be honest) in a flow diagram of Failure vs Failing:
We failed until we didn’t
Bruce Springsteen
Failure vs Failing
“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways in which it will not work.”
- Thomas Edison
Quitting is not the same as failure.
The following is abridged from the above podcast, I strongly encourage you to listen, but a summary of some important notes are here:
“What distinguishes great poker players from everybody else is mainly quitting. They quit a lot more. So they're just very good at cutting their losses. So they fold more hands to start. Once they've committed money to a pot, they fold a lot more. They change tactics or strategies, like, in the middle of things. Um, and you have to be willing to do that.”
Annie Duke ($4m poker prize money winner and author of books on decision making)
Regret asymmetry and the bias behind It:
“There are two really important biases to think about because they collide here when it comes to quitting. The first cognitive bias is called status quo bias. Status quo bias is that we have a preference for the path that we're already on. So we don't like to change. We have a preference to keep going the way that we're going.
That collides with another bias, which is called omission commission bias, uh, and what that is, is that failing to act does not feel as much like a decision as acting does. Right? So let's say that I'm in a career or I'm in a relationship, and I just stay the path. It doesn't feel like I've made a decision. If I move, if I quit my job and change, if I break up in the relationship, now it feels like I've actually made a decision.
Now, the reason why this is an error is because the decision to stay in the job is also an active decision, and you should treat it the same way.”
The danger of goal-setting and how to do it properly:
“Another strategy we can use to quit closer to when we should is to increase the flexibility in how we set goals… So there's this amazing work by Maurice Schweitzer, who's at Wharton at University of Pennsylvania, we have this idea that goals are just generally good but he's saying there's a real downside to goals which is when you have a goal and it does two things to you:
It privileges certain values that you might have and deprivileges other values that you might have. So we need to be very thoughtful about, when I think about this goal, first of all, what am I not seeing? And what am I giving up that I'm following this goal?
Goals are also pass/fail. So, in a lot of ways, it's better to have never tried to go up Everest at all than to have gotten within 300 feet of the summit and turned around.
So how do we solve for this? There's kind of two ways that we solve for it. The first way that we can do is to remember the word “unless”. And this is really important, think about these things in advance. It's totally fine to say, "This is my goal unless," right? So my goal is to reach the summit unless there's really bad weather. So this idea of, "This is my goal unless," allows you to say, "I am setting this goal given what my information is right now."
The second thing, I think... So I was speaking to Ken Kamler, who is really amazing. He had been a doctor on Everest, actually, six different times. And he said something, I think, that was really profound. He said, "People forget when they're climbing Everest that the goal of Everest is not to get to the summit. The goal is to get back down to the base of the mountain." And why I think that that's so powerful is that he's talking about a time horizon problem, is that we get really wrapped up in the short term a lot when we ought to be thinking about the long term.”
Longer term thinking allows for many more changes of course and changes of direction without being seen as a quitter. Focus on the longer term bigger picture issues, family, happiness, wealth, health etc… and then the decisions along the way are all to those goals.