

Aim to Fail - ramchip
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/aim-to-fail

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jibiki
This sounds really smart, but I don't know if it is. Let's say you want to be
a great basketball player. If you're short and fat, you won't be one, no
matter how much you practice. Michael Jordan was an incredible natural
athlete. It's true that he's more than that: there are lots of incredible
natural athletes who end up working at gas stations, and maybe some of them
would have made the NBA if they had been as willing to fail as MJ. But if
you're not naturally athletic (or extremely tall), you will never be a great
basketball player. Period.

The second problem is that the fear of failure is, in the right context,
fantastic motivation. You will never do anything well if you don't care about
it, and if you genuinely care about something, you will come to hate failing
at it. I've never met a good chess player who took losses well.

My suspicion is that it's important to do a lot of practice where failure is
cheap and a lot of practice where failure hurts. But I'm not a very successful
person, so I have no idea.

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ramchip
_My suspicion is that it's important to do a lot of practice where failure is
cheap and a lot of practice where failure hurts._

I'll concur on that. I consider it much preferable to have tried when failure
hurts (and failed) than to have a nagging regret later on ("what if I'd
tried"). That's advice I take from my love life and not from chess or
startups, but I hold that the (emotional) cost of failure is still very
real...

