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The Alternative to Failure

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Great post by Seth Godin:

“What would you have me do instead?”

To the critic who decries a project as a worthless folly, something that didn’t work out, something that challenged the status quo and failed, the artist might ask,

“Is it better to do nothing?”

To the critic who hasn’t shipped, who hasn’t created his art, anything less than better-than-what-I -have-now appears to be a waste. To this critic, progress should only occur in leaps, in which a fully functioning, perfected new device/book/project/process/system appears and instantly and perfectly replaces the current model.

We don’t need your sharp wit or enmity, please. Our culture needs your support instead.

Each step by any (and every) one who ships moves us. It might show us what won’t work, it might advance the state of the art or it might merely encourage others to give it a try as well.

To those who feel that they have no choice but to create, thank you.

Why Success Often Starts with Failure

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A helpful article from the 99%.

Here’s the first part:

“Few of our own failures are fatal,” economist and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford writes in his new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. This may be true, but we certainly don’t act like it. When our mistakes stare us in the face, we often find it so upsetting that we miss out on the primary benefit of failing (yes, benefit): the chance to get over our egos and come back with a stronger, smarter approach.

According to Adapt, “success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right first time.”

Excellence is not the Opposite of Failure

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Marcus Buckingham states this well in Go Put Your Strengths to Work:

The radical idea at the core of the strengths movement is that excellence is not the opposite of failure, and that, as such, you will learn little about excellence from studying failure.

This seems like an obvious idea until you realize that, before the strengths movement began, virtually all business and academic inquiry was built on the opposite idea: namely, that a deep understanding of failure leads to an equally deep understanding of excellence. That’s why we studied unhappy customers to learn about the happy ones, employees’ weaknesses to learn how to make them excel, sickness to learn about health, divorce to learn about marriage, and sadness to learn about joy.

What has become evident in virtually every field of human endeavor is that failure and success are not opposites, they are merely different, and so they must be studied separately. Thus, for example, if you want to learn what you should not do after an environmental disaster, Chernobyl will be instructive. But if you want to learn what you should do, Chernobyl is a waste. Only successful cleanups, such as the Rocky Flats nuclear facility in Colorado, can tell you what excellence looks like.

Study unproductive teams, and you soon discover that the teammates argue a lot. Study successful teams, and you learn that they argue just as much. To find the secrets of a great team, you have to investigate the successful ones and figure out what is going on in the space between the arguments.

Well said.

Don't Internalize Failure

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From the book It: How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It [note: I’m not necessarily recommending the book in this case — haven’t looked through it enough –, but this was a helpful quote I took a picture of when I was thumbing through it in a bookstore]:

Don’t internalize failure. Remember that failure is an event, not a person. When you do fail, allow yourself to feel the disappointment. That’s reality, and an important part of it. But don’t internalize disapproval. Just because you failed at something doesn’t mean your a failure. Shake it off. And try something again.