Stop celebrating failure
A miskeeto byte from Robert Hoekman, Jr. Posted on April 23rd, 2009
Silicon Valley has been hung up on the idea of celebrating failure for years. When you fail, as the theory goes, you learn, and learning enables you to improve. Failure equals innovation. But does the reality live up to the dogma? And if not, what’s with all the hype? If the dogma has never felt quite right to you, consider celebrating something else instead. But what?
Silicon Valley has been hung up on the idea of celebrating failure for years. When you fail, as the theory goes, you learn, and learning enables you to improve. Failure equals innovation. But does the reality live up to the hype? And if not, why is the idea so widely revered?
Fast Company’s Richard Watson presented his case for failure in a July 2008 op-ed piece titled “Celebrate Failure”. In the piece, he listed his five tips for “failing with greater frequency and style”:
- Try to fail as often as possible but never make the same mistake twice.
- Set a failure target as part of each employee’s annual review.
- If projects are a failure, kill them quickly and move on.
- Create a failure database as part of knowledge management.
- Set up annual failure awards. If this gets too successful, stop it.
37signals founder Jason Fried recently countered the notion of failure-as-virtue in his blog post, “Learning from failure is overrated”:
I don’t understand the cultural fascination with failure being the source of great lessons to be learned. What did you learn? You learned what didn’t work. Now you won’t make the same mistake twice, but you’re just as likely to make a different mistake next time. You might know what won’t work, but you still don’t know what will work. That’s not much of a lesson.
Watson believes failure is a goal — so much so that he advocates trying to “fail as often as possible”. Fried believes that the potential lessons-learned from failure are deceptive and there is more value in studying successes. Both arguments are presented as opinions. They lack any evidence one way or the other. So what do the facts tell us?
From a Peach Seedz summary of a recent Harvard Business Review research paper titled “Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship”, it seems Fried is on the right track:
The study compared entrepreneurs with a successful track record with first time entrepreneurs and those who had failed in the past. Not surprisingly, the entrepreneurs with past success were more likely to succeed with subsequent ventures (30% vs. 18% for first-timers and 20% for entrepreneurs who had previously failed).
But while Fried is more right than wrong, he also seems to be missing at least part of the point. The Silicon Valley types who swear by failure are not necessarily seeking to learn what’s right by first learning what’s wrong. They’re trying to learn what’s great by first learning what’s less than great.
Scientific method gives us a path through which to discover truths through experimentation. Is every experiment that falls short of an inexplicable truth, then, a failure? Hardly.
Plenty of failures aren’t really failures at all. Plenty of failures are really just decisions that don’t quite have the intended or expected result. These so-called failures can, and often do, lead to other opportunities. New ideas. New ambitions. New products. New successes.
So where’s the joy of the failure? When a failure leads to success, it’s not a failure — it’s just part of the process. Is it really failure that’s being celebrated, or the effort of getting there?
I believe the notion of celebrating failure became popular based on a skewing of the underlying truth in an effort to make the idea sound controversial and disruptive. Failure is not appealing. In fact, failure sucks. It’s a tremendous waste of time and money, and as Harvard Business Review’s report indicates, there is absolutely no guarantee that the lessons learned from it will yield any new useful intelligence or insight. We need to stop looking at failure and start looking at what lies beneath it. Failure’s motivations. Instead of toasting to crash-and-burns, celebrate effort. Creativity. Ingenuity. Experimentation.
Passion is what’s really worth celebrating. Passion is the motivator behind each and every failure that’s worth learning from. It’s what leads to the creative spark, the drive to succeed, the will to keep seeking the right path. The best teams are filled with it. The best companies are built on it. The best products let it shine through.
Stop celebrating failure. Start celebrating passion.
