I think the idea that success is a better teacher than failure is true when it comes to large, long-term mistakes (losing your business, house, marriage, etc.). But on the ground every day, minor failures are very instructive and even contribute to long-term success.
In fact, if you set things up so that minor failures are out of the question, you might actually be setting yourself up for failure in the long run. Why? Because small mistakes don’t just grow from foolishness or a bad work ethic; they’re the by-product of taking healthy and calculated risks. If you’re not making small mistakes, you might not be trying out different strategies and taking on new challenges often enough.
If you’re not making small mistakes, it might mean you’ve whittled your universe down to a few variables you can perfectly control. This can be a fine short-term fix but it’s a horrible long-term strategy, because focusing on just a few predictable variables will stifle learning and growth over time.
If you’re not making small mistakes, you may be avoiding deeper problems and allowing them to simmer underground. After a while, these issues add up to a boiling cauldron. Better to fail small and avoid the cauldron, because making mistakes putting out little fires is far less costly than making mistakes dousing volcanoes.
Of course, the best part about making mistakes is fixing them. It goes like this: Try something new (or even something mundane). Screw up a little bit. Make a note to self. Scratch method X from your repertoire. Try something different. Improve over time.
It does not go: Try something new. Screw up a little bit. Hate yourself and quit. Or: Try something new. Screw up a little bit. Blame your coworker/boss/boyfriend/lunch. Or: Try something new. Screw up a little bit. Ignore failure and repeat.
No. You gotta buy what you break. And give a good-faith effort not to break anything in the first place, because by “make mistakes” I do not mean “disregard the feelings & needs of others while bulling your way through the china shop of your career.” But I digress.
Matt and I fail like we’re being paid to do it. That food-anthropology site we tried to create? Fail. That time we tried to implement no-twitter week? Fail. That time we almost rented a huge office for just the two of us? Fail. That time we tried to enforce a billable hour minimum? Fail. Fail. Fail.
We fail all the time. Not on purpose, but by design—we build space for failure into our process, and expect to make mistakes on a regular basis.
Setting yourself up for success on a large scale means devising systems and experiments that might cause you to fail on a smaller scale. This is called engineering. The scientific method. A scientific approach (which is really just an artistic approach with a different haircut) is required in business, too.
How about this? If you’re not making small mistakes, you make the baby jesus cry.
7 Comments
I agree with you that you should be open to mistakes, but I wouldn’t call the little ones failures. Failures are huge errors you could never recover from (going out of business, divorce, etc).
All of those things you listed as “Fail” were just mistakes. Don’t be so hard on yourself.
Kevin. I like how you think. Reworded.
Beautiful! What a way to put things into perspective! To err is human so in a way, we are embracing our own humanity by accepting the fact that we are bound to make make some screw-ups here and there… I remember when I was a design student, one of my professors always talked about “happy mistakes”, things that we discovered by accident when we wanted to accomplish something else. Some of those happy mistakes were later on incorporated as part of our design process…
Happy mistakes! That’s a lovely & gentle way of putting it. Noted.
Your closing statement nearly had me laughing soda out of my nose!
It’s true, small mistakes help us learn. Huge mistakes are just huge. I can deal with little failures here and there but I refuse to not learn from them.
Diane: Oh good! I hope you didn’t get hurt. And I dig your site.
Failures are the outcomes of mistakes and they aren’t always catastrophic. In addition, catastrophic failures can be caused by even simple mistakes, especially the more complex the system the mistake occurs within. And by system, I mean any kind, be it hardware, software, or social (i.e. organizations).
With regards to learning from our mistakes, usually the more severe the failure, the quicker we learn from the mistake. If the failures are minor or inconsequential though, they can still relay learning over time, as repeated small failures build up knowledge awareness via repeated pattern recognition.
All said and done though, I think the trick is to try to take big enough risks so that you can learn from them but at the same time they don’t destroy you in the process.
One last thought though. Without giving yourself the time to stop, reflect, analyze, and realize, it’s often difficult to learn from one’s failures.