In today's world, the term “failure” has a seriously negative connotation. But the reality is that failure is a regular part of everyday life and should be embraced. “Fail early and often” is a phrase that can be heard frequently in startups but also in larger, innovative companies. Ed Catmull, current President of Walt Disney Animation Studios as well as the co-founder of Pixar, in his book Creativity Inc. said “To be wrong as fast as you can is to sign up for aggressive, rapid learning”. Ed isn’t saying that failure is the goal, just that it is better to be decisive, quickly, than to wait for the perfect solution to present itself.
The situation that many find themselves in, is waiting for more information. Of course there are times where more information is indeed necessary for proceeding. However, making the decision to move towards a goal, even if it is the wrong goal, is often the better choice. Take the military commander who is in a valley and knows that there is an enemy force on one of the two hills that are on both sides of the friendly force. In this scenario, assaulting the wrong hill will likely result in casualties, and certainly will tax the energy and supplies of the troops; still, one of the two hills must be assaulted. The only absolutely wrong choice is to sit in that valley and wait for the enemy forces to engage from the high ground. If the decision to assault the wrong hill is made quickly, then the fact that it is the wrong hill will be discovered more quickly than if the commander had waited for more complete information.
These principles are not only applicable on the battlefield. There are industries like aerospace, where the tolerance for failure is zero and any failure will result in the loss of life. But the desire to create perfection is often a more powerful force than the desire to create a workable, flawed product. How often is a perfect product or solution developed? Not very often. Whether it is Elon Musk breaking the “unbreakable” windows on the Tesla truck, or Bill Gates getting the “blue screen of death” during the Windows 98 unveiling, products, even expertly designed and developed, fail. The sooner those failure points can be identified, the sooner there can be a solution.
This is not to say that haphazard products should be developed and pushed into the market to wait for consumer feedback, but within the development phase, taking decisive action early can reap vast results. A 90% solution to a problem today is better than a 100% solution in the future. Empowering developers and engineers to create an imperfect product quickly so that feedback can be given and corrections made, will shorten production time and create a better end result.
Time is one of the most valuable resources. Anything that can be done to save time and expedite processes should be done. Failures are a regular part of life and should be expected and embraced, not feared. Reinforcing this mentality is an excellent way to empower employees, especially if they are working in innovative fields and attempting to create something new.
“The greatest teacher, failure is,”-Yoda
Failure is what shape who we are as people. While success is what you look back on as your key moments, it is what we do when we do not succeed that set us on the path to those future successes. However, that is not to say that failure is good all the time. Especially in journalism, failure can lead to misinformation, widespread chaos and even harm to people. Accuracy is more important than learning in some professions. However, when it comes to innovation I agree. Messing something up allows you to take it new directions. Even with something as basic as cooking failure always leads me to a different success. If something doesn’t taste…
Richard, you are so wise; I really enjoyed reading this post. Failure is hard for everyone to swallow, but the matter is that everyone fails at some points in their lives. I think failure can be a very positive thing. When you fail, it can allow you to work harder and know what areas to enhance. For example, I did not get into USC right out of high school; I "failed" to get in. Once I knew what failure felt like, I saw where I could do better, got back on my feet, and worked hard at another school to get to USC. That failure made me appreciate the University that much more.
This was an amazing article Richard, I think the fear of failure is often one of the hardest things to overcome, on the path to any goal, whether investing, academic, or a personal hobby. The first time I came to USC and tried to learn how to skate I sprained my ankle and was on crutches for the rest of my summer program, but I never actually fell that bad again, failed hard and didn't fail(too badly) again. The same has gone with my experiences with engineering at USC, the introductory courses my Freshman year were my first experiences with being in the middle of a class experience wise, and some classes even failing and having to use freshman forgiveness.…
Like Eliana mentioned, so many of us like to manage every little detail and it causes us to freeze up. Nothing is worse than rushing a decision and finding that doing so resulted in a major issue. Despite this, I agree that we all just need to make progress sometimes by making choices regardless of the outcome. In many scenarios we may only have a couple of options and thus taking the trial and error path may be a reasonable decision. Also as you state, "a 90% solution to a problem today is better than a 100% solution in the future". Regardless, most of us need to adopt a more gung-ho approach to situations and hopefully this post w…
Many of us are control freaks who let fear of failure paralyze us. It is definitely an uncomfortable feeling but as you point out, learning from failure leads to better overall results. It’s nice and freeing to be reminded that agonizing over whether something is the most optimal decision is a terrible method for being productive. I think it’s important to trust your instincts and see failure as a positive force. Disney has a great quote that goes, "It is good to have a failure while you're young because it teaches you so much. For one thing it makes you aware that such a thing can happen to anybody, and once you've lived through the worst, you're never quite as…