Failure is overrated, a redux

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1643-failure-is-overrated-a-redux

by johns • 17 years ago

29 13 17 years ago

fiaz• 17 years ago

I think it's important to emphasize that the beginnings of "failing one's way to success" started with many quotes from Thomas Edison. It's usually a bad idea to generalize any quotation to a rule, but I think in this specific case, it might be useful to say that there is no failure or success, only possibilities.

If anything, making judgments either way is overrated.

elv• 17 years ago

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Sir Winston Churchill

Retric• 17 years ago

I agree. Silicon valley's successes tend to never start companies again. So the mantra "learn from failure" has more to do with keeping motivated than directly useful advice.

jonas_b• 17 years ago

"Silicon valley's successes tend to never start companies again"

Really? I thought the opposite was quite true. Marc Andressen, Steve Jobs, Jim Clark etc.

mauricio• 17 years ago

Exactly. This is what Jason seems to miss. No one sets out for failure nor do they think failure is a good thing. The axioms and other well-known phrases were designed to keep you going after failure, not to inspire you to fail.

devin3• 17 years ago

Totally agree.

One other thing I would like to add with respect to this article is that it reeks of a blog post designed to elicit a reaction by pitting two concepts with opposite meanings against one another. This sort of thing is useful when those concepts are concrete and discrete (lazy vs eager evaluation, for instance), but with something as fuzzy as success and failure you just make a mess by trying to place them in artificially constructed boxes.

This is in my view another prime example of people trying to think in binary in too many areas of their life. Success does not exist without failure, literally. Success is the absence of failure. They need one another to exist. Trying to write about how one is more important than the other is, IMO, a fool's errand.

jfornear• 17 years ago

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." -Neils Bohr

axod• 17 years ago

It's not a binary thing. There are several types of failure.

Being locked up for fraud would be one failure that's unlikely to be a good sign for future investors.

Having a product offering that is ahead of its time, so there isn't a market yet would be an example of a good failure. You did everything right, apart from time things well.

The fact is, once you succeed, it's natural to stop trying. So there's way more data from failures than from success.

You can't really learn anything from one success. You could have just been lucky.

Just look at programming, you might iterate an algorithm a few times before you hit on something you think works well. Each iteration, you're learning from the failure of the last. You're assessing what you could make better, and implementing it the next time.

andreyf• 17 years ago

I think the reason the glorification of failure is (and ought to be) popular is because there are more smart people with good ideas not starting companies for fear of failure than there are people starting companies aiming to fail.

Even that number comparison aside, for VC's, I think the cost of people starting a company which fails is far less than the benefit of people starting successful companies that wouldn't have been started if the founders didn't overcome their fear of failure.

twoz• 17 years ago

“the world would have been no different if I had not been here the past six months”

As long as this isn't what you're saying to yourself, you're well on the way to some sort of success.

Source: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1437-put-a-dent-in-the-un...

devin3• 17 years ago

Oh look! Another binary discussion on learning from failure vs success!

One word: Balance.

One is not better than the other. These concepts do not exist without eachother. Failure would be nothing without success, and vice versa. Learning that is the first step to not wasting your time reading anymore of this fluff.

Failure is overrated, a redux

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