🌀Au Contraire: Failing is good

Failure is good.

I didn’t say it felt good. It sure as hell doesn’t feel good.

Those of us that are driven to succeed are pre-programmed to hate failure. Our education system programs us to believe succeeding is good and failure is bad.

I know that failure is necessary. I know it. I know it. I just hate it, hate it, hate it.

So what if you fail? So what? We are supposed to fail, but the programming in our mind tells us we have not succeeded. I get it. Failure is a motherfucker.

But it shouldn’t be. It is practically the only way to learn. Experience is just the name we give our mistakes. The word “expert” comes from the word “experience.” To claim that title you must have many failures. An expert knows the solution because they know 488 ways that don’t work and one way that does work.

And as an experienced business person… read that as (fucked up a lot) I know failure very well. And I have to constantly remind myself that failing to try is much worse than failing to succeed. And giving up on failing is even worse.

The value of experimentation is not the trying. It's the trying again after the experiment fails.- Simon Sinek

Repeated iteration is the path to success. Or in other words, repeated failure(learning) is the path to success.

I know it burns sometimes, good lord almighty does it burn. But you know it is necessary. Instead of failing there are better suited words for it.

Iteration. Experimentation. Testing.

There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes. - R. Buckminister Fuller

It helps to reframe failure as an answer to curiosity. The most curious people are usually the most successful.

The best people at succeeding are the best people at failing. It is a perspective shift to not look at things as right/wrong or succeed/fail, but as a method of testing outcomes and continually iterating on each outcome of the experiment. Controlling failure just like you would control an experiment in a laboratory. And become a testing facility to continually optimize for a better outcome.

A set back is just a set up for a comeback. If you are not failing, you are not learning. And every once in a while, you get lucky. So keep rolling out the bets, your odds are better the more you bet. You ain’t gonna get lucky unless you’re playing the game.

~Blue

P.S. What failure has led you to your biggest breakthrough?