Failure is Overrated: Hacking Failure for Success

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There’s plenty of literature in the entrepreneurship and leadership genres about the glory of failure. Conference speakers talk about times they have failed and how they wouldn’t be where they are today without that failure. Blog posts on why you should fail forward! and fail often! sing the praises of failure for creating a working product or a successful leader.

And they may be on to something. Very few successful creators — business leaders, inventors, authors, speakers — succeed on their first try. Failure helps us refine our methods and our products. It weeds out those of weaker resolve from those with the resolve to get by in an ever-changing and fast-paced world. In the marketplace, loss (like profit) works as a signal to a firm to change its practices or product. Without failure, we wouldn’t be aware of these shortcomings.

But most of the time, failure sucks.

Even when it helps us learn something about ourselves and our practices, even when it actually ends up propelling us down the path to success, and even when it is rooted in our own shortcomings that we were previously blind to, failure makes us feel powerless.

There are ways we can successfully fail. There are ways we can maximize the benefits and knowledge gained from failures while simultaneously minimizing the cost of failure. We can hack failure to make it work for us, not against us.

Most of the cost of failure is rooted in the ways in which it sets us back. It takes time to clean up, put the pieces back together, and move on to our next iteration. We have to mend broken or damaged personal and professional connections. We have to move quickly, lest good opportunities be passed by while we are doing the cleaning and mending. In other words, we have to fail early, fail vicariously, and fail fast.

1. Fail Early

Failure knocks us down. Depending on the depth of the failure — a failed relationship or major business venture — it can be existentially destructive. It can shatter all that we have worked towards and built up.

Failure makes a mess that we have to clean up before we even move forward to a new iteration. Sometimes, we have people and institutions relying on us through this failure. We have families, spouses, clubs, employees, organizations all depending on us to handle the failure well and get things moving again.

Sometimes we can’t handle it well, though. Sometimes you have to sell the house, lay off the R&D department, and resign as your local lodge leader just so you can pick up the pieces.

Failing early helps us minimize these secondary effects of our own failures. We are more willing to take the risks to fail if we know we don’t have to worry about how the rest of the family is going to eat next month or how you are going to explain to half of your employees why you are laying them off.

With fewer things holding us down, we can take larger risks and fall harder from unforeseen failures. Failing early is one of the only ways to do this.

Why do fewer people fail early? School-creep has something to do with it.

School-creep is the fact that the age to which most middle-class people are expected to go to school keeps increasing over time. To acquire a job that once required a high school degree now requires one to have a BA. To become a teacher now requires an MA. To be a researcher requires a PhD. To be a communications intern at some corporations, you have to be at least an MA student.

One of the biggest dangers of school-creep is that it insulates people from professional risks — you can’t start a risky business venture as a full-time student — while not insulating them from the other developments of life. Somebody can graduate from graduate school at 27 with a wife and a child and never have worked a single day in his life or taken a real, true risk. Any risks he takes now have at least two other people to be considered.

2. Fail Vicariously

Failure can be a deeply personal experience. For those endeavors in which one devotes one’s work, life, and spirit, one can be driven to believe that the project is not only a failure, but that “am a failure.”

So why not fail through others?

This doesn’t mean drive others to failure and watch how they would handle it. Far from it.

Failing vicariously is the act of being around those who have accomplished or tried to accomplish what you wish to achieve and learning from their past. Seeing where they have laid down the path forward and missed a few potholes can help a young achiever avoid those very same setbacks.

Why learn the hard way that X is wrong when somebody who has tried X can tell you it is?

Again, this is intuitive enough, but schools make it hard for young achievers to fail vicariously. Their professional networks are horizontally diverse (same age/stage of life), but not very vertically diverse (different age/stage of life). The little vertical diversity they have is likely made up of professors and academics (if the young person is looking to become an academic, this can work). Insulation from vertically diversified professional networks makes failing vicariously extremely difficult for the average 22- or 23-year-old student.

3. Fail Fast

In addition to causing a mess (see #1), failure eats up time. The primary effects of the failure may take hours, days, or weeks to get under control. The secondary effects may run much longer. During this time, while our mental energy is primarily devoted to doing damage control,  opportunities come and go that we would otherwise have had the opportunity on which to jump had we not had our attention directed elsewhere.

The third key failure hack is to fail fast. Get moving as soon as possible towards rectification of the situation and clean things up so you can get moving.

The hardest part of this is the psychological aspect. Failure may seem like the end of a venture or project, but the frame of reference is what determines what role it will play in the grander scheme. Looking at failure as a signaling mechanism relative to a broader goal or destination helps us recover, internalize the lessons learned from the experience, and launch a new iteration.

Failing fast requires us to adopt a relative mindset. “If this project fails, that will be less-than-ideal, but I can make the most of it and avoid such problems in the future,” is the mindset of somebody who fails fast.

Yet again, school makes adopting a relative mindset towards failure difficult. Students come to see certain experiences as watershed moments — finals, taking SAT tests, receiving college admission letters. This make-or-break mindset is nearly incompatible with a relative mindset towards failure. If you don’t get into any college you applied to and your whole life revolved around getting into college, the mental shift of changing frames of reference to a new goal could be psychologically jarring.

A more diversified lifestyle than that of the elite student (i.e., one focused on admissions, credentials, impressing others) is necessary to easily shift frames to a relative mindset. One in which fewer things turn on the impression one makes of others, the credentials one acquires, or the status in an admissions portal is a bare minimum.

 

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