Good judgment comes form experience but experience comes from bad judgement.
It took me a while to wrap my head around this, but, after 17 years of entrepreneurship, I think I got a little bit of it.
Success Is Not A Very Good Teacher
We seem to learn better - and deeper - from mistakes, rather than from success. When we’re successful, we’re most of the time too busy enjoying the good stuff that we generated so we hardly give any time to learning. Success feels like it was “deserved”, even if - or even especially if - we’ve been just hit by luck.
Failure, on the other hand, hurts. Big time. Losing money or losing opportunities, well, none of these things are easy. We perceive them as hurdles and we spend a lot of time analyzing "what went wrong". Our natural preservation instinct forces us to analyze failures, in order to avoid similar outcomes in the future.
Failure instills fear and when we’re in that “fight or flight” situation we’re forced to learn. Most of the fears instilled by failure are not real (fear in itself is not real, but that’s another topic, for another article) but in this case they are actually useful.
How Many Times Do You Need To Fail?
Let me give you and example: I don’t know if you heard of a little game called Angry Birds. You know it? Good.
You think it was an instant success? Think again.
Angry Birds was the fiftieth game released by Rovio. That number seem small if you compare it with the billions Rovio makes now with Angry Birds, but I urge you to step away from the computer and try to count to 50. Do it right now. When you finish, come back.
Well, how was it? When you really stay with that number, it seems pretty big, right?
Now try to multiply the time you spent for each digit with at least 3 to 6 months, the average time you need for the simplest game to go from zero to “App Store ready” status.
There’s a lot of failure there. A lot.
Being successful in a constant, predictable way, is a matter of leveraging failures.
Hence, the necessity to fail programmatically at stuff.
Programmatically means not only to be prepared for failure, to accept it if it comes, but rather to expect it.
Many ideas look great on paper. Many projects look great on that flip-chart. But once you try to make them real, something happens. A detail you forgot messes up everything.
My approach is to search for these situations. To hunt failures. To kill them one at a time, until what I get is a pure, valuable and tested business process.
Maybe the whole Steemit experience will be a big failure for me, but I'm decided to fail in a programatic way, hence my 30 days challenge. I want to do it systematically. It's the 7th day of the challenge so far and I have a hunch that it won't be a failure.
Nevertheless, I'm prepared to accept it, if it is. Because it means I can free my mind from it and move forward, experiment, try something new.
Don’t be afraid to fail. Kill all your “brilliant” ideas by making them real first. Take them out not only from your mind, but also from the lab, from the drawing board, from that Agile map and throw them into the real world. Test them on real users, on real people and see if they fail.
99.99% of the “genial” ideas don’t survive after you make them real. 99.99% is a big number. Prepare to fail for 99.99% of your time.
The 0.01% is really worth the pain.
This post is part of a 30 days challenge on business, you can find the entire list of articles here.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running.
