Elon Musk Explains the Fallacy of Learning from Failure

As usual, an idea adopted by our culture (you learn more from failure) to counter a still worse idea (never fail!) has been taken too far (you learn nothing from success).

Details, nuance, and subtlety matters. The stories we hear from our culture are almost always presented as black-and-white, because the gentler ideas won't cut through the noise. But it's the more complicated notions that are almost always closer to the truth.

It's about time someone decided to debunk this awful bromide. Everyone who will fail (and succeed) conjures some personal lesson that is ill-derived, and eventually gets passed on as ambient, philosophical noise that people mistake for wisdom.(cough Brad Feld) You can only learn what not to do again from a failure, but a success gives you a recipe for future success, at least to a certain degree. At the end of the day, there are guidelines to follow, but everything is personal. Everyone has their own methods. You are respeonsible for your own pool of wisdom, and that requires building it from the ground up. I wouldn't say that an example of said pool that was constructed without any experience of failure is any worse than one built from success.

I generally agree with Elon Musk, but I disagree here. It is not so much that I think you learn more from failure or success itself. Rather I think you learn more when you think deeply about why something did or did not work/happen. In my experience, people usually stop to think deeply when they fail.

In addition, success usually means overcoming failure again and again especially for something hard like building a rocket. I suspect he is equating failure with quitting. I would certainly agree that you learn nothing from quitting, but failure is not necessarily quitting.

>"If anyone tells you they learn more from failure than success, then they’re wrong. You learn more from success. "

Looking at it from a binary, black and white point of view, then I'd argue you learn the same whether you succeed or fail. Elon's point is true, if you succeed you have learnt that what are you doing is correct, and works. Whereas if you fail, you've learnt that what you were doing was wrong and didn't work. In both cases you've learned something. The only difference is that failure creates more opportunities to learn again. If you've got a winning formula, you're unlikely to change it, whereas if you fail and start again, you can then learn if your new formula is any better and repeat until you win.

One problem with this generalisation however, is that life isn't just win or lose. It's made up of many wins and many losses and it's easy for one big win, or one big loss, to hide all of the other achievements. I'm sure SpaceX and PayPal have had more than their fair share of failures but their one big "win" (The ability to make money, although not yet in SpaceX's case) is overlooked.

Maybe the fallacy of this reasoning is that is very hard to succeed the very first time ?

And if you fail just once, your future success is also based on your previous failure ?

But I see his point nonetheless, if you take the stigma out of failure, you are less motivated to succeed...

Two reasons he's right:

1. If you succeeded for cause, you can often identify exactly what elements are needed for success in the next instance (whereas if you failed, you'll think long and hard about the "lessons" you need to take, but that doesn't leave you with a recipe for success - you may have several more failures to go at your rate)

2. The visceral feeling of soul-searching, of really thinking, of facing reality, isn't something that should be reserved for post-mortems of spectacular failures. Why not all the time? Further, an unexpected success would, for me, lead to just as much deep re-thinking - I wouldn't just adjust my optimism set-point and move on; I'd want the to understand the elements of my success.

I guess you usually don't learn much from success, but success proves and/or validates what you have already learned previously. OTOH failing offers and highlights things to learn, but it doesn't automatically mean you do learn them.

Success is often the result of timing or luck. Any lessons learned here would probably be incorrect. With failure, it's easier to identify the correct causes.

You can learn from failures and successes. Why does every headline need to be so self-assured and bombastic these days?

I'm like, so expert .. toke .. y'know, I'm like an expert ... toke ... at success, dude. Like ... longer pause, thoughtful toke ... learning from failure? sudden stoner laugh! wait 5 minutes, throw in a line of cocaine and a wry grin ... that's for fuckin' losers. maniacal laughter