

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

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axod
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.

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

~~~
mauricio
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.

~~~
devin
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.

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andreyf
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.

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devin
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.

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twoz
_“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...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1437-put-a-dent-in-the-universe)

------
fiaz
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.

