Failure is overrated

There's already somewhat of a meme or mythology surrounding the stereotypical "learn from your mistakes" adage. In this post, I will attempt to present a contrarian approach.

So, if you're asked in a job interview, "tell me about a time you failed," it's already somewhat amusing. If you failed at something and immediately jump to a conclusion, don't. If something doesn’t work, it could have failed for numerous other reasons. People tend to oversimplify and focus on a single reason for their failure, ignoring the many other potential factors. Sometimes, people draw the wrong lessons from failure, such as "I was too ambitious" or "I shouldn't take risks" or "don't trust people," etc.

"You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try." — Homer Simpson

You can observe this phenomenon quite clearly in the startup scene. "We failed due to lack of product-market fit," "My co-founder quit." No, you simply didn't have enough money. That's the sole reason. Stop with the esoterica. SpaceX improves not because they "fail" often but because they succeed at many small things frequently without being bogged down.

Failure is how intangible things that the human mind can't grasp are optimized. Many startups are trying out things with AI. Many will fail, but a few might succeed, without even understanding why. The failed ones might also not understand. Yet, as a whole, the system learns.

This is such a great tweet. There are thousands of ways to fail, but only a few ways to succeed; hence, we could say that success is more valuable. But most of the time, it is often more talked about how people failed because it happens more often than when they won. It's alluring due to either your past successes or privileges. Failure humbles everyone and reminds us of our shared humanity, as well as helps you better cope with it to get you back on your feet when 'learning from it.' Or, like Tolstoy said, 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Another problem is confirmation bias, which most of the time success or failure is often bound to. This leads back to the story about the Chinese farmer I once wrote. Humans are really good at making quick conclusions to avoid facing uncertainty. It's hard to distinguish between essential and accidental factors, and usually, it's a combination of reasons that lead to the outcome. So, one of the most valuable lessons of success is to not automatically believe that because you had success, you are good or smart. There might be a correlation between your actions and the outcome, but this surely does not imply causation. Additionally, episodic really good or bad events often tell big lies, dominating or recoloring our causation. This is why, for example, startups, when surviving a black swan, will often become too bureaucratic and get organizational scars.

The Cargo cult is another trap you can fall into. This happened after WW2 when indigenous islanders in the South Pacific tried to get military cargo planes to fly to them by observing the behavior of the military personnel and building their own landing strips and towers without having any clue how they worked.

This serves as a metaphor for the human tendency to replicate behavior or, in this case, failures in the hopes of achieving desired outcomes, even when those behaviors have no logical connection to the desired results or when there is no understanding of anything about the underlying principles.

I'm not saying you should only learn from success; I think you should contrast both, ideally multiple instances of each. And it's probably better to learn from 'almost failures' and try to learn the skill to foresee and understand the potential failure of any situation, as well as analyzing your success for failures. Whatever it is, you don't learn soley by listening to others or reading about others. Learning is by doing, and it's something I get reminded of from time to time again. Failure and success are secondary if learning is the goal; those are only byproducts rather than the ultimate objectives themselves. Hearing or reading diverse ideas or perspectives just helps you articulate and unclutter your mind to an extent, helping you in articulating your own beliefs more clearly.

While I will now completely contradict what I said above, I think the advice I pointed out earlier is too generalistic, and I don't like generalistic advice. While I can still think of a lot of failures I learned from, it's always dependent on the situation. It's also something to be antifragile about, which I will discuss in another post soon. Just something to think about.

Thanks,

Finn