How to Make Failure your Friend

Having explored the growth mindset in his first article, Jared now discusses how we need not be afraid of failure. In fact, he argues that learning from our mistakes and failures is essential to succeeding and growing faster.

We hear a lot about failing these days. But who likes to fail? Not many. In fact, I’m not sure I know anyone who really wants to fail. However, I know a lot of people who want to learn, grow, get better and succeed.

And these same people want to do it as fast as they can — they want to accelerate their growth and learning to achieve success faster and more gloriously.

Is failure the price of learning, or even the price of success? Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player ever, believes he only succeeded because he failed so often.

Let’s see what he says…

“I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot, and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.”

But is Jordan right? Do we really have to fail in order to succeed?

Maybe it’s just that we have to make mistakes, struggle to get better at something, or even practice over and over again, even when we’re not very good at first. 

Learn faster by making mistakes

Yes, we do need to fail in order to succeed faster — or at least we have to learn in order to succeed. And amazingly, we learn fastest when we make mistakes and correct them as we go. Research has shown we can learn up to 30 percent faster and retain 25 percent more if we learn by making and correcting mistakes rather than just through rote study and memory.

Amazon and Google are revered for their innovation and success. We see their successes and try to copy them. Yet, we quickly forget how many failures they’ve had. Thomas Edison is famous for saying that he didn’t fail once in inventing the light bulb, he just found out how to not do it 10,000 times.

That’s the experimental attitude. Because if everything, like Edison’s work, is an experiment, then nothing is a failure.

How do we fail successfully?

1.     Identify what you are interested in doing — set a goal for what you want to accomplish

2.     Create a hypothesis articulating what you believe, or what you think will happen

3.     Design the experiment to test your hypothesis and ensure you learn something whether you succeed or fail (don’t overdesign or over think it, but be sure to focus on what you will learn or the question you will answer)

4.     Run the experiment — try it!

5.     Collect data and measure results

6.     Analyze the results and figure out what to experiment with next

You can hopefully imagine several easy experiments you could design to test these hypotheses individually. The key will be to run the test, keep notes and collect data, and finally analyze the results and learn.

Just remember — a failure in an experiment is always a success — it means you learned something and will help you get to success more quickly next time.

So let’s go and do it.

Let’s practice more.

         Let’s make more mistakes.

                  Let’s experiment continuously.

And yes, let’s fail — and use it to ensure our success.