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"If you're failing, you're doing something right." I didn't think people said this and meant it. If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right

"If you're failing, you're doing something right." I didn't think people said this and meant it. If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings. Yeah, you can learn from it and do better, and that's great - but that doesn't mean it's a success. It's a failure and - in some cases - a chance to do better the next time. Trying to portray it as a good thing because your goal was a hard one only lessens the value you can receive from it.

deleted 12y ago
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blhack 12y ago
I'm going to get up from my chair and go to the water cooler to fill up my water bottle. I bet I will succeed at it. How is this different to you than launching rockets? It's different to me because launching rockets is much more difficult. There are many more things that can cause you to fail catastrophically. To me, failure is to be expected when you're doing something that is difficult. That is the definition of doing something difficult.
- eitally 12y ago
  But in this case, as well as several others (like surgery, for example), that's not at all true. We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" for a reason: those are fields in which mistakes are not acceptable and the cost of producing as well as the cost of insuring are incredible. There is really nothing comparable between a code jockey who weaves js frameworks and SaaS services together to build apps and the engineers who wrote the assembly 30, 40, 50 years ago to power and control our space craft... or the ones who do the same thing now using more modern hardware & tools at companies like Orbital Sciences or SpaceX.
  - rbanffy 12y ago
    > We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" Fun note: a very long time ago I dated a woman who happened to be a brain surgeon. She used to joke her work was actually easy because nobody realy expecting her patients to survive.
  - ajcarpy2005 12y ago
    Exactly. The development of rocket software is a very precise business. Here's a Reddit AMA from the SpaceX software development team.http://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap http://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap
  - louthy 12y ago
    > We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" for a reason https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I My favourite of those.
- GrinningFool 12y ago
  That's a fair point, and one I don't disagree with. Where I do disagree is the idea that failure is a measure of success or even the potential for success. It's a potential indicator of either the difficulty of the task, the abilities of the people performing the task, or both[1]. It's also an indicator that no matter how many things were done right, one or more things were done wrong. I feel that your original post and subsequent reply reflect the pervasive perception that failure is a requirement for doing something big successfully. I think that's a misconception that's running rampant in the startup community. Failure can happen and it can be learned from, but success is possible without it. 1. In this case I'm going with 'difficult' and 'some things not done right'. Strongly suspect incompetence was not a factor :)
lutorm 12y ago
If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings. I disagree. The only practical difference could be that you got unlucky. People seem to forget that taking risks actually means things can fail, even if you do nothing wrong. That's what a risk means. If you say a failure means you did something wrong, then you have an acceptable risk of zero. This means you can do very few things. Every time you get into your car, you are taking a calculated risk of severe injury or death. And that happens to many people who never do anyhing wrong.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  This edges into politics, which means some people are pretty much incapable of believing it: If they believed it, they'd have to revise their political views, and that would lead to a lot of other changes in their lives. To be specific, if the race isn't always to the swift, and if the best person can lose due to situations out of their control, maybe it isn't immoral to rely on a social support system for a while, which implies that perhaps we should fund such things. And saying that is political suicide in some circles.
solistice 12y ago
As I've understood it, it means that the scale of your ambitions is right. Consider a continuum of things that you can do, divided up by difficulty. For some part of it, you allways succeed, for some part of it, it's a mix of sucess and failure, and for some even more difficult part, you always fail. Now in order to succeed at something consistently, you need to master it, which also means that the things you always succeed at are fully mastered. Any knowledge or skills to be gained in those areas are at best minuscule improvements. Then there's the part where you succeed sometimes and fail sometimes. But each time you fail, you gain more data on how you failed, and you think about how you can fix those points. You're learning, and you're improving. Now there are also tasks at which you'll consistently fail. Passing the BAR exam as a programmer with no preparation would be a good example. Since you have no sucesses to compare to in that area, you wouldn't learn a lot trying to retake the BAR exam, no matter how often you did it. You're lacking in knowledge and skills required, and trying to perform at that level doesn't do you any good. Now the ratio of failures and sucesses is more of a rule of thumb, and not an ironclad model. If you do turn it into an ironclad model, tell me, because I'd love exact metrics to shoot for. The reason that the common adage is "If you're failing, you're doing something right", at least so I believe, is that "If you're failing some and succeeding some, you're closer to your optimum failure/success ratio for growth than if you are at either end of the extreme" simply doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely. You can't put that on the cover of a self-help book. And since almost everyone is inclined to default to the "sucess" side of the continuum (coloquially known as your comfort zone) instead of the "failure" side (excluding select masochists), it makes a lot more sense to tell someone to fail more often. It's not a curse, it's a call for more ambitious projects. In this specific case, it's a comforting call to the fact that they're trying hard enough to fail at something. And I think that is commendable.
- klodolph 12y ago
  I think the generalization is overbroad. Risk of failure should be weighed against the consequences of failure. If I'm writing code for robots as a hobby and my robots behave exactly as I intended all of the time, then I'm probably not learning anything, and I should try to make the robots do more sophisticated tasks. The consequences of failure are minimal, so the optimum failure rate is high. If I'm at work writing avionics code, the cost of failure is astronomical. It's nice to push boundaries and learn things, but it's better to avoid plane crashes. The consequences of failure are high, so the optimum failure rate is low. I think the problem with rocket science is really the tyranny of physics. All the potential and kinetic energy you give to the rocket has to be stored in chemical form on the launchpad. You have to sit right on the edge of catastrophe or you are not going to make it into space at all. We've been doing this for half a century and the safety record is, quite plainly, not very good. When we learn how to do spaceflight safely, we'll do that.
ams6110 12y ago
For me the essence of the idea that failure is part of (and maybe even required for) eventual success is expressed in Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
- GrinningFool 12y ago
  Failure can contribute to longer-term success, there's no doubt. But it's not a measure of success in its own right. Even re-reading OP's post today, that remains my interpretation of both what he said, and the more general sense in which the failure-related 'wisdom' is getting spread about the startup community.
travelhead 12y ago
Failure is nearly always bad. It destroys company morale, drains financial resources, and creates a culture of failure. I agree that failure does often happen on the way to success, but there's absolutely nothing good about it besides giving more knowledge to a problem. The culture that failure is good is stupid.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  The "move fast and break things" mentality is not saying that its good to break things, it's saying that breaking things is the price of moving fast. Failure is bad, but so is being over-cautious. We all already know that failure is bad. No one like to fail so we don't need to keep saying that failure is bad. People often lose perspective and think that it's not worth taking a sensible risk, so we say things like "If you're failing, you're doing something right." to encourage them.
- SAI_Peregrinus 12y ago
  Failure during production is bad. Failure in design/testing is fine, that's when you can correct it most readily. Not all failures are equal.
krisgenre 12y ago
I once read this on the Internet a long time back - "The problem with most people is not that they fail trying to reach their goals, the problem is that they set their goals too low and succeed" The parent probably meant that if you are succeeding too easily, you aren't really aiming high.
teekert 12y ago
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. -Winston Churchill Personally I think he meant that eventual success is often achieve by applying this strategy.
- dr_frankenstien 12y ago
  It's not just about lost of enthusiasm but also (mostly) about lost of sources (time, money). But what to say? St happens. It's scientifically proved. http://www.iyqk.com/v/very-expensive-fireworks-compilation-of-rocket-launch-explosion http://www.iyqk.com/v/very-expensive-fireworks-compilation-o...
_asciiker_ 12y ago
I agree, this isn't a failure when trying something new, we have done this hundreds if not thousands of times. It should have been a routine mission, failure should not be accepted.

deleted 12y ago

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blhack 12y ago

I'm going to get up from my chair and go to the water cooler to fill up my water bottle. I bet I will succeed at it. How is this different to you than launching rockets? It's different to me because launching rockets is much more difficult. There are many more things that can cause you to fail catastrophically. To me, failure is to be expected when you're doing something that is difficult. That is the definition of doing something difficult.

eitally 12y ago
But in this case, as well as several others (like surgery, for example), that's not at all true. We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" for a reason: those are fields in which mistakes are not acceptable and the cost of producing as well as the cost of insuring are incredible. There is really nothing comparable between a code jockey who weaves js frameworks and SaaS services together to build apps and the engineers who wrote the assembly 30, 40, 50 years ago to power and control our space craft... or the ones who do the same thing now using more modern hardware & tools at companies like Orbital Sciences or SpaceX.
- rbanffy 12y ago
  > We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" Fun note: a very long time ago I dated a woman who happened to be a brain surgeon. She used to joke her work was actually easy because nobody realy expecting her patients to survive.
- ajcarpy2005 12y ago
  Exactly. The development of rocket software is a very precise business. Here's a Reddit AMA from the SpaceX software development team.http://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap http://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap
- louthy 12y ago
  > We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" for a reason https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I My favourite of those.
GrinningFool 12y ago
That's a fair point, and one I don't disagree with. Where I do disagree is the idea that failure is a measure of success or even the potential for success. It's a potential indicator of either the difficulty of the task, the abilities of the people performing the task, or both[1]. It's also an indicator that no matter how many things were done right, one or more things were done wrong. I feel that your original post and subsequent reply reflect the pervasive perception that failure is a requirement for doing something big successfully. I think that's a misconception that's running rampant in the startup community. Failure can happen and it can be learned from, but success is possible without it. 1. In this case I'm going with 'difficult' and 'some things not done right'. Strongly suspect incompetence was not a factor :)

lutorm 12y ago

If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings. I disagree. The only practical difference could be that you got unlucky. People seem to forget that taking risks actually means things can fail, even if you do nothing wrong. That's what a risk means. If you say a failure means you did something wrong, then you have an acceptable risk of zero. This means you can do very few things. Every time you get into your car, you are taking a calculated risk of severe injury or death. And that happens to many people who never do anyhing wrong.

cbd1984 12y ago
This edges into politics, which means some people are pretty much incapable of believing it: If they believed it, they'd have to revise their political views, and that would lead to a lot of other changes in their lives. To be specific, if the race isn't always to the swift, and if the best person can lose due to situations out of their control, maybe it isn't immoral to rely on a social support system for a while, which implies that perhaps we should fund such things. And saying that is political suicide in some circles.

solistice 12y ago

As I've understood it, it means that the scale of your ambitions is right. Consider a continuum of things that you can do, divided up by difficulty. For some part of it, you allways succeed, for some part of it, it's a mix of sucess and failure, and for some even more difficult part, you always fail. Now in order to succeed at something consistently, you need to master it, which also means that the things you always succeed at are fully mastered. Any knowledge or skills to be gained in those areas are at best minuscule improvements. Then there's the part where you succeed sometimes and fail sometimes. But each time you fail, you gain more data on how you failed, and you think about how you can fix those points. You're learning, and you're improving. Now there are also tasks at which you'll consistently fail. Passing the BAR exam as a programmer with no preparation would be a good example. Since you have no sucesses to compare to in that area, you wouldn't learn a lot trying to retake the BAR exam, no matter how often you did it. You're lacking in knowledge and skills required, and trying to perform at that level doesn't do you any good. Now the ratio of failures and sucesses is more of a rule of thumb, and not an ironclad model. If you do turn it into an ironclad model, tell me, because I'd love exact metrics to shoot for. The reason that the common adage is "If you're failing, you're doing something right", at least so I believe, is that "If you're failing some and succeeding some, you're closer to your optimum failure/success ratio for growth than if you are at either end of the extreme" simply doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely. You can't put that on the cover of a self-help book. And since almost everyone is inclined to default to the "sucess" side of the continuum (coloquially known as your comfort zone) instead of the "failure" side (excluding select masochists), it makes a lot more sense to tell someone to fail more often. It's not a curse, it's a call for more ambitious projects. In this specific case, it's a comforting call to the fact that they're trying hard enough to fail at something. And I think that is commendable.

klodolph 12y ago
I think the generalization is overbroad. Risk of failure should be weighed against the consequences of failure. If I'm writing code for robots as a hobby and my robots behave exactly as I intended all of the time, then I'm probably not learning anything, and I should try to make the robots do more sophisticated tasks. The consequences of failure are minimal, so the optimum failure rate is high. If I'm at work writing avionics code, the cost of failure is astronomical. It's nice to push boundaries and learn things, but it's better to avoid plane crashes. The consequences of failure are high, so the optimum failure rate is low. I think the problem with rocket science is really the tyranny of physics. All the potential and kinetic energy you give to the rocket has to be stored in chemical form on the launchpad. You have to sit right on the edge of catastrophe or you are not going to make it into space at all. We've been doing this for half a century and the safety record is, quite plainly, not very good. When we learn how to do spaceflight safely, we'll do that.

ams6110 12y ago

For me the essence of the idea that failure is part of (and maybe even required for) eventual success is expressed in Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

GrinningFool 12y ago
Failure can contribute to longer-term success, there's no doubt. But it's not a measure of success in its own right. Even re-reading OP's post today, that remains my interpretation of both what he said, and the more general sense in which the failure-related 'wisdom' is getting spread about the startup community.

travelhead 12y ago

Failure is nearly always bad. It destroys company morale, drains financial resources, and creates a culture of failure. I agree that failure does often happen on the way to success, but there's absolutely nothing good about it besides giving more knowledge to a problem. The culture that failure is good is stupid.

seanflyon 12y ago
The "move fast and break things" mentality is not saying that its good to break things, it's saying that breaking things is the price of moving fast. Failure is bad, but so is being over-cautious. We all already know that failure is bad. No one like to fail so we don't need to keep saying that failure is bad. People often lose perspective and think that it's not worth taking a sensible risk, so we say things like "If you're failing, you're doing something right." to encourage them.
SAI_Peregrinus 12y ago
Failure during production is bad. Failure in design/testing is fine, that's when you can correct it most readily. Not all failures are equal.

krisgenre 12y ago

I once read this on the Internet a long time back - "The problem with most people is not that they fail trying to reach their goals, the problem is that they set their goals too low and succeed" The parent probably meant that if you are succeeding too easily, you aren't really aiming high.

teekert 12y ago

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. -Winston Churchill Personally I think he meant that eventual success is often achieve by applying this strategy.

dr_frankenstien 12y ago
It's not just about lost of enthusiasm but also (mostly) about lost of sources (time, money). But what to say? St happens. It's scientifically proved. http://www.iyqk.com/v/very-expensive-fireworks-compilation-of-rocket-launch-explosion http://www.iyqk.com/v/very-expensive-fireworks-compilation-o...

_asciiker_ 12y ago

I agree, this isn't a failure when trying something new, we have done this hundreds if not thousands of times. It should have been a routine mission, failure should not be accepted.