Today I found myself answering a series of questions on Silicon Valley’s attitude to failure. You know — the whole “fail fast, fail forward” thing…
The fixation on failure seemingly for the sake of failing is just wrong. All you learn from failing if you focus on the experience of failing (which we seem to emphasize these days) is one more way of not succeeding.
Instead, focus on the learnings you get from your experiences. Accumulating knowledge and compounding it by accelerating your ability to learn through rapid experimentation is insanely valuable.
The key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. Striving for a lot will inevitably lead to higher failure rates — but it is also the only way to make a dent in the universe and make big hairy problems go away. Failing well means focussing on the learning instead of the failure itself.
Strive for a lot and fail well my fellow Heretics!