The Value of Mistakes and Failure
âTo try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.â Chester BarnardÂ
âYou miss 100% of the shots you don't take.â Wayne Gretzky
âA new answer to the same question / How many times will you learn the same lesson?â âLegendaryâ song by Welshly Arms
Celebrate your success, embrace and learn from your failures.
I'm not going to explain too much about the first part. Everyone knows how important success is. Without it you can't go on with your pursuit, be it your education, business or job. Performance is usually evaluated on your success, if you don't perform you don't promote, you don't raise another round of investment, etc. We all know that.Â
Success generates success. That is also touted a lot. The more success you have, the more likely it is that you know how to be successful again in a new endeavour. "Serial entrepreneur" basically implies that you started multiple businesses and you had enough success to be motivated to start another. Given how hard it is to start a business, you would be crazy to continue trying after failing 10 times in a row.
I will not say more about success, because what we don't do enough is talk about our failures. My claim is that we are underestimating by a high margin the value of failure.
This can be partially because failure feels a lot worse, in particular when it can be attributed directly to you. Instinctively, you try to forget as quickly as possible, you try to hide it from others, including parents, managers or investors.
I propose to embrace failure. Let it feel bad for a while. That feeling usually motivates you to figure out the causes of the failure. And if you discover something that you could have done differently to at least increase the chances of success the next time, you learned something very useful since it's from your own unique experience. No amount of reading or coaching could teach you that.
Of course some lessons can be learned without making the mistakes yourself. I can tell you for sure that regular smoking is really bad for you. There is enough evidence to make this not worth exploring yourself at the risk of badly harming your health. There is not much to be learned from starting to smoke other than perhaps how hard it is to give up a harmful daily habit later on in life.
Same goes with certain psychoactive substances like heroin. If you try heroin, the chances are high you would want to try again which very quickly leads to a really strong addiction. Read about opioid addiction and what happens if you go down that path and you know that is not a mistake worth making. The risk cost versus the opportunity to learn something useful simply don't make sense in this case.
But most other mistakes and failures are not that harmful.
You tried some new move while playing soccer with your friends. You fell, you sprained an ankle. It will recover after some time. Through that time you learn that you risked too much and now you can't play soccer because of that. This one is easy.Â
You were over ambitious and committed to too many goals, more than you can handle. You fail some of those goals, perhaps you burn out. Now for some time work is really unattractive, perhaps even life doesn't make much sense. But then you discover you have friends and family that care deeply about you and with some suffering, a lot of care and therapy, you get back on your feet. You learn to put priorities in your life. You learn that work, career success or business is really not more important than your health. You might learn that you have friends even at work. You might discover you had interest in a different type of work and you make a pivotal turn in your career.
This one is tricky because some people burn out and don't fully recover. So don't burn out that badly, please. Ideally you never burn out, but instead learn that work is not much more than something to keep your hands and mind fit and oriented towards a goal. You might have the ambition to change the world with your business, career or scientific research. But you will never get to change the world if you burn out and don't recover. Don't let over-ambition stand in the way of the end goal of your pursuit. Most "world changing" goals involve a marathon of work spread over the years, usually involving many more people than yourself. Whatever you do must be sustained over time, bursts don't work in the long run.
If you optimize for learning and well-being you are probably on a very good path. You made a mistake that cost you your job, half of your savings or your startup. As long as that mistake did not hurt your well being or freedom, as long as you learned your lesson out of it, you will be able to move on with your life. You will find a way to stay happy even without what you just lost, at least until you have a new job or a new business idea. This does not apply if you are retired. But then you don't have a job that pays and hopefully your savings don't disappear overnight.
Celebrate your success. I know you will in your presentations, promotion statements, elevator pitches and chats with your friends. However, don't forget the value of mistakes and failures. Don't hide them under the carpet. You are then giving up an excellent opportunity to learn something unique to you, and this is priceless.Â
Don't be engulfed for too long with the natural feelings that surround a mistake or failure. Then you get depressed and sacrifice your well being. But don't move away too quickly from these feelings either because they are just as important and human as pride and joy are.Â
I would go as far as to say that if you don't make mistakes in your pursuit, you are not progressing as fast as you could.Â
But be more careful when your mistakes have the potential to make more people suffer. Those mistakes have a higher weight than the mistakes that only cause suffering on your end. Also be more careful with the mistakes that have potential for bigger material losses. Those large losses could be used for better purposes.
However, you will never develop a sense for the risk of an action without making some mistakes yourself. If you have someone with experience that is helping you to avoid the big mistakes, appreciate that help because it is very valuable. But assert your courage to make some decisions yourself and don't be too afraid of making a mistake in front of that person. They are likely wise enough to know the value of such a mistake.
Here is video of the Kung Fu Panda scene from which the above picture comes from.
You made a mistake. First off, congratulations! How do you learn the most out of this mistake? Here is a list of ideas of what you could do:
First make sure you recovered from the mistake, psychologically, physically and materially.
Assess how big of an impact the mistake had and whether it's worth going the extra mile to avoid making this type of mistake in the future.
Understand the reasons that lead to the mistake. Would the outcome be any different if you made different choices or acted differently?Â
Register what you learned in a document living the cloud or your paper notebook. Review the notes with some regularity (e.g., once every 3 months).
Talk to a few people about your mistake and your analysis so far. This might bring new perspectives and new lessons. Also, talking to people means you are on a good path acknowledging and accepting your mistake.
For bigger mistakes, write a postmortem. Find someone to review the postmortem, in particular what action items you will commit to to reduce the likelihood of this mistake happening again.Â
There is also the concept of pre-mortem, but that seems to be about avoiding mistakes as a team. This is also very valuable.
After you have done the analysis, collected your learnings, make sure you move on and don't ruminate about the mistake.
I am quite grateful for the many suggestions I received from three special people that reviewed early drafts of this post:
Nelson Mattos -- COO of the Karimu Foundation. I really like the mission of the foundation!Â
To the other folks: if youâd like your name to be mentioned here, please let me know :)
