Stop Fetishizing Failure

The choice of words is telling. Serious entrepreneurs (even unsuccessful ones) are not "fetishizing" failure at all. To be an entrepreneur is to live and breathe execution, and fetishizing something is not effective execution under any circumstances.

The "cult of failure", as the author puts it, is nothing more than entrepreneurial common sense; an inevitable reaction against the status quo of safety-seeking behavior that causes people to be so failure-averse as to avoid risking anything. Such common conservatism is of course anathema to the essence of entrepreneurialism, and therefore it gets a lot of ink in the echo chamber.

But don't confuse this budding nugget of conventional wisdom as the cause of a wholesale exodus from common sense. The whole article is setting up a giant straw man that could only be applicable to people who are so hopelessly mired in the mythology (and/or tabloidism) of the startup world as to be effectively impotent in actual execution, and thus unworthy of any serious consideration to begin with.

In other words, no one seriously believes that failure is an end unto itself.

It took me a long time to learn that if you aren't failing occasionally, you probably aren't pushing your own capabilities.

It's dangerous to be scared of failing. Yes, you can and should learn from both succeeding and failing, but continue to work hard and push yourself either way.

I found these lines curious:

Get labelled a “Failure” and it can ruin your life. As a pedagogical methodology, embracing failure is the last thing these kids need.

So rather than telling these kids that failure isn't a bad thing and that they can learn from failing and grow we should continue telling them that failing sucks and makes you a failure? Or, if not telling them, at least letting them keep the mindset? And that's supposed to be the better alternative? How does that work?

No one likes failing

If we seem to be fetishizing failure, it is only to push back against the fetishizing of success that has developed here. I think we have a tyranny of being afraid to fail in America. Our culture of meritocracy and achievement has made most of us hypervigilant about avoiding failure, to the point of being neurotic.

Fear of failure only hurts us collectively because it means we take fewer risks. Fewer risks => less innovation, less diversity in the marketplace.

Fear of failure hurts all of us. If being labelled a failure can destroy your career, it's not really helpful to further stigmatize failure by saying it's a "fetish", right? You're just making failure into an even worse word.

Maybe the saying should be "fail early, fail often, but never the same way twice".

If you're failing in different ways then that shows you're learning. If you just keep failing -- making the same mistakes -- well that's a real problem and not something to be celebrated.

Hmm... not sure where this article is coming from (maybe it's some kind of satire?) but the premise that we're "fetishizing" failure and somebody needs to defend that "we learn from success too" sounds pretty comical to me.

except every single good thing we have is built upon failure. got a gsm phone? broadband? how about a modem? a pc? basic chemistry? cryptography? the very notion of cryptography is embracing the failure of having private data leaked.

did you know 802.11 was initially made for infrared? do you remember how much it sucked? maybe if would have progressed faster if it was out in the wild faster. that's how it's progressing now.

yeah, you may not like it. and every now and then I hear the idea that "when you're dealing with critical things, like healthcare where someone's life may depend on it, you cannot afford failure". except that's not true. those systems actually embrace failure more than anything else.

google reliability engineering.or look at this:

http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1...

there is a nice talk on failure from richard cook at the velocity conf:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S0k12uZR14

The title of this article led me to believe it was going to make a certain argument, but went ahead and made a completely different one based upon a strawman. For me, there is a real argument against the whole "failure movement", but it's not this one.

The problem with the startup-meme that failure is to be embraced is that it can cause people to lose sight of the fact that failure is a state you reach only after you make a real, concerted effort and have lots of corroborating evidence that you truly have no product-market fit. It's much more fun to build new projects than to go through the slog to get through the trough of sorrow. This being the case, it's very temping to quickly write off projects that seem to be going nowhere since it's now acceptable to fail, since it drops you back into the exciting mode where you are building stuff again and your imagination is the limit, both for the product and for the prospects of success.

In other words, I think there needs to be a clearer explanation of what "failing fast" really means. It means fail fast, but not too fast. You really need to be sure you're actually in a true failure mode and not just a few bug fixes and enhancements away from exiting a local minima. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out a way to determine if you are in hitting your head against a thick wall or a thin one.

I think this is one reason why it's very important to have very detailed metrics and data, and build in an experimental approach to product development so you can see just how much leverage you have when it comes to making incremental improvements. 10x'ing a 0.001% conversion rate doesn't really get you much, but 10x'ing a 0.1% conversion rate could make the difference between success and failure. Also detailed metrics can help reveal if there are certain breakdowns in your funnels that you would not be aware of if just looking strictly at inputs an outputs. A 0.001% conversion rate may mean that your product has no market, or it might mean you fucked up your Javascript on your credit card submission form. The only way to know is to measure.

Stop fetishizing low-contrast grey fonts: http://contrastrebellion.com/

I thought it was more scientific than entrepreneur focused... the competing goals of "science" are to think up a prediction generating falsifiable model, and to break someone else's model. Classic computer science analogy: Nothing get crypto CS more excited than proving some algorithm fails.

Some hard sciences are more open to failure than others. Good luck publishing a negative result chemistry paper, with the unusual exception if the purpose is to disprove someones previous published positive result paper.

Cranking it back to the article, although a "failure based curricula" would be brilliant for teaching history, especially history of sciences, its a complete waste of time for background stuff for average people. Its important for a historian of chemistry to know people used to be really "into" the four elements air water fire and earth, but probably not a good use of limited teaching time to test everyone on it.

The author is conflating two different meanings of the word "failure": the act (as in not succeeding at something) and the label (as in being labeled a failure). The whole post is based on this fallacious logic.

The concept of "embracing failure" is precisely about learning that if you fail at something, it doesn't mean you are a failure.

I am a little surprised we are not hearing the points from this article more often.

Yes, we can learn from failure and so on, nobody is disputing this. The problem however is way too many people are taking a way too permissive and lax attitude towards failure instead of trying to figure out how to succeed. Permitting yourself to fail is the easy way out to avoid doing lots of hard and gritty work. The best learning happens before you actually fail at something, when you figure out you are ON THE PATH to failure and make a course correction to avoid it.

The overall capital formation ecosystem is probably to blame for this lax attitude. When the financiers make the most return from a few biggest winners taking crazy risks they do not care about mean failure outcome in their portfolio.

Remember, people who tell you it is OK to fail are not the ones who will have to live with the consequences of you failing.

Anyone agrees with what he says in the article? I think I actually agree with him somewhat. Statistically, the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. If you have always failed in the past, the probability of you succeeding in the future would be low but not impossible.

I think what most of written world writes is to remove yourself from failure thinking be result thinking instead - extract valuable information from what underwater stones have you had encountered. So next time you can recognize those.

So in general most of the promotion of failure is about learning and keeping your mind open to be faster and more brazen next time - because you already know where those traps are.

Usually complete failure consists of multiple failures - which is why it is important to remove yourself from the situation whatever it is and give the situation that caused it a complete analytic run down of the situation.

There is a big difference between failing intelligently (being able to learn from it) and failing recklessly (doing anything to avoid finding and doing the things that matter).

The difference in recognizing this subtle but huge difference is a little bit of maturity and constantly evolving one's ability to self-reflect.

Otherwise, it's easy wasting your 20's on ideas other people may cheer you on but are a low percentage play, whereas you could spend the same time learning what value, and creating measurable and verified value is.

My own sense of failure is in the purely scientific sense:

In order to have a meaningful idea, it has to be falsifiable. In other words, it has to be a hypothesis, and testable.

Then you apply the test that would falsify it, and if the idea fails, you have learned something, and are able to focus your next hypothesis in a more useful direction.

It sounds like the objections like this article completely miss the point of that. It's not like we're telling people to go and do something random and stupid and then trumpet about it.

Has no one thought to ask what people mean by failure? I for one feel that there could be a lot to be gained by decreasing the emotional impact of failing, without going so far as to reduce people's desire to succeed.

It could be quite possible to fail (in objective terms), learn from your mistakes and try again, without suffering the social stigma or emotional impact of failure as that word tends to be understood.

This post reminds a lot of a post by 37 signals' Jason Fried one time about startups and failure. This days failure just seem sexy. Its never good and cool to fail and will not. At no time should you plan or consider the option of failing. Its like preparing for divorce on your first day of marriage and then again I could be wrong.

The Play mode he brings up at the end sounds like "fail fast" without the structure of figuring out why you failed. There's no control over the failure, just a lot of inputs and hoping you've targeted what's working.

Fail often / fail fast is just the scientific method made iterative.

The trick isn't to fetishize failure. The trick is to move forward in spite of the natural fear of failure.

No.