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Want to succeed? Try failing
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agoRead his book "The monk and the riddle". I promise you it will mean a lot and quite possibly change your life.
- rglullis 17y ago“The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss” - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- mad44 17y agoSorry I may be too dense. But, what is the point of failure, if not to learn a lesson and succeed eventually. He seems to be saying the only time he did not fail (he got a raise) was when he did not enjoy the experience, it was too incremental. So, we should keep failing, and failing. Yes, I am missing the message. This may be acceptable for an academician. But is it acceptable for a businessman. After all he mentions that you feel the disappointment of 250 people and families that depended on you. Are you supposed to make it a habit and enjoy it. Again, probably, since this is only a segment from the interview, I am not getting the full message.
- darkxanthos 17y agoThe point of failing is to aim for failure by always challenging yourself and expecting that you will "fail" and learn from said failure. The reason why this isn't as bad as it sounds is because quite often when we push ourselves for failure we find that we really succeeded at every goal we had. Failure stops looking personal and starts looking like feedback, like variables in an equation that you're trying to reverse engineer. Don't avoid failure is the theme. Embrace it and use it in the feedback system that is your learning process to fine tune your velocity towards your goals.
- gcheong 17y agoFailure is a given in any innovation industry, therefore to be successful you have to be able to tolerate failure, learn from it and move on - not have it be the end of one's career- otherwise nobody will be willing to take on the risk of failure required for success. You can learn from the failures of others, but you never learn as much as from the failures you experience personally.
- ojbyrne 17y agoIt seems largely self-serving, since VCs want companies to shoot for big payoffs, and therefore having one individual company fail doesn't really cause them any pain. They're not the ones losing their jobs.
- ojbyrne 17y agoIt's about the 150th article to appear on this particular theme here.
- darkxanthos 17y agoThus its importance is inversely proportionate to your reply's score. :)
- samdk 17y agoI really don't like this headline. You'll never learn anything if you try to fail. Failure should not be a goal. You are very probably going to fail at some point. It's important not to let the fear of failure prevent you from acting in the first place, and it's important to be able to deal with, accept, and learn from failure.
- petercooper 17y agoCue a rebutting (but not admitting that's what it is) 37signals blog post in 5.. 4.. 3.. Seriously, though, I think the message is more that you should take bigger risks and push yourself further into an area where failure is quite likely.. rather than to merely try to fail ;-)
- 10ren 17y agoI recall this translation of Singapore-Chinese slang: scared to lose (ke-ya su, phonetically) Startups are experimentation, and as in science, most experiments are "failures" (quoted, because both positive and negative results of an experiment give you information... if it's well-designed).