
Stop Fetishizing Failure - muratmutlu
http://creativeintelligencebook.com/post/41570210573/stop-fetishizing-failure
======
dasil003
The choice of words is telling. Serious entrepreneurs (even unsuccessful ones)
are not "fetishizing" failure at all. To be an entrepreneur is to live and
breathe execution, and fetishizing something is not effective execution under
any circumstances.

The "cult of failure", as the author puts it, is nothing more than
entrepreneurial common sense; an inevitable reaction against the status quo of
safety-seeking behavior that causes people to be so failure-averse as to avoid
risking anything. Such common conservatism is of course anathema to the
essence of entrepreneurialism, and therefore it gets a lot of ink in the echo
chamber.

But don't confuse this budding nugget of conventional wisdom as the cause of a
wholesale exodus from common sense. The whole article is setting up a giant
straw man that could only be applicable to people who are so hopelessly mired
in the mythology (and/or tabloidism) of the startup world as to be effectively
impotent in actual execution, and thus unworthy of any serious consideration
to begin with.

In other words, no one seriously believes that failure is an end unto itself.

~~~
wtvanhest
I agree with you fully. My experience has taught me that the people I want to
associate with have a narrow definition of risk and are not willing to fail.

I have met "entrepreneurs" who have said things like, "if this fails, we will
just do another project! No big deal, failure is part of the process"
conversely I have met people in corporate America who assume that any
financial or personal risk is completely ridiculous to take.

The 3rd group I have met are entrepreneurs who are willing to take a personal
and financial risk while assuming success will be there's despite the odds.
They never talk about failure because it simply isn't an option until it is
inevitable. They stay consistently focused on execution and do not worry at
all about the potential for failure because at their core it doesn't matter.

People in the 3rd group are the people I want to work with every time. They
take well calculated risks naturally and deliver results.

~~~
Evbn
Care to fill in the explanation of how people who ignore assign 0 probability
to failure take well calculated risks?

~~~
wtvanhest
The basic idea is that people who assume things will work out make better
decisions. If you think you will be successful, individual interactions take
on less importance, and you can execute in an efficient way.

------
influx
It took me a long time to learn that if you aren't failing occasionally, you
probably aren't pushing your own capabilities.

It's dangerous to be scared of failing. Yes, you can and should learn from
both succeeding and failing, but continue to work hard and push yourself
either way.

------
masterzora
I found these lines curious:

 _Get labelled a “Failure” and it can ruin your life. As a pedagogical
methodology, embracing failure is the last thing these kids need._

So rather than telling these kids that failure isn't a bad thing and that they
can learn from failing and grow we should continue telling them that failing
sucks and makes you a failure? Or, if not telling them, at least letting them
keep the mindset? And that's supposed to be the better alternative? How does
that work?

------
Aqueous
No one likes failing

If we seem to be fetishizing failure, it is only to push back against the
fetishizing of success that has developed here. I think we have a tyranny of
being afraid to fail in America. Our culture of meritocracy and achievement
has made most of us hypervigilant about avoiding failure, to the point of
being neurotic.

Fear of failure only hurts us collectively because it means we take fewer
risks. Fewer risks => less innovation, less diversity in the marketplace.

Fear of failure hurts all of us. If being labelled a failure can destroy your
career, it's not really helpful to further stigmatize failure by saying it's a
"fetish", right? You're just making failure into an even worse word.

~~~
sopooneo
From what I have read of entrepreneurs in Europe, one of the greatest things
about starting a company here in The States, is that failure does _not_ carry
the same stigma here.

------
kenjackson
Maybe the saying should be "fail early, fail often, but never the same way
twice".

If you're failing in different ways then that shows you're learning. If you
just keep failing -- making the same mistakes -- well that's a real problem
and not something to be celebrated.

------
svachalek
Hmm... not sure where this article is coming from (maybe it's some kind of
satire?) but the premise that we're "fetishizing" failure and somebody needs
to defend that "we learn from success too" sounds pretty comical to me.

------
rjzzleep
except every single good thing we have is built upon failure. got a gsm phone?
broadband? how about a modem? a pc? basic chemistry? cryptography? the very
notion of cryptography is embracing the failure of having private data leaked.

did you know 802.11 was initially made for infrared? do you remember how much
it sucked? maybe if would have progressed faster if it was out in the wild
faster. that's how it's progressing now.

yeah, you may not like it. and every now and then I hear the idea that "when
you're dealing with critical things, like healthcare where someone's life may
depend on it, you cannot afford failure". except that's not true. those
systems actually embrace failure more than anything else.

google reliability engineering.or look at this:

[http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1...](http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=9781409445517&lang=cy-
GB)

there is a nice talk on failure from richard cook at the velocity conf:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S0k12uZR14>

~~~
Evbn
<http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/2110301>

Haha wow. I do miss IrDA though.

------
gfodor
The title of this article led me to believe it was going to make a certain
argument, but went ahead and made a completely different one based upon a
strawman. For me, there is a real argument against the whole "failure
movement", but it's not this one.

The problem with the startup-meme that failure is to be embraced is that it
can cause people to lose sight of the fact that failure is a state you reach
only after you make a real, concerted effort and have lots of corroborating
evidence that you truly have no product-market fit. It's much more fun to
build new projects than to go through the slog to get through the trough of
sorrow. This being the case, it's very temping to quickly write off projects
that seem to be going nowhere since it's now acceptable to fail, since it
drops you back into the exciting mode where you are building stuff again and
your imagination is the limit, both for the product and for the prospects of
success.

In other words, I think there needs to be a clearer explanation of what
"failing fast" really means. It means fail fast, but not too fast. You really
need to be sure you're actually in a true failure mode and not just a few bug
fixes and enhancements away from exiting a local minima. One of the biggest
challenges is figuring out a way to determine if you are in hitting your head
against a thick wall or a thin one.

I think this is one reason why it's very important to have very detailed
metrics and data, and build in an experimental approach to product development
so you can see just how much leverage you have when it comes to making
incremental improvements. 10x'ing a 0.001% conversion rate doesn't really get
you much, but 10x'ing a 0.1% conversion rate could make the difference between
success and failure. Also detailed metrics can help reveal if there are
certain breakdowns in your funnels that you would not be aware of if just
looking strictly at inputs an outputs. A 0.001% conversion rate may mean that
your product has no market, or it might mean you fucked up your Javascript on
your credit card submission form. The only way to know is to measure.

------
dredmorbius
Stop fetishizing low-contrast grey fonts: <http://contrastrebellion.com/>

------
VLM
I thought it was more scientific than entrepreneur focused... the competing
goals of "science" are to think up a prediction generating falsifiable model,
and to break someone else's model. Classic computer science analogy: Nothing
get crypto CS more excited than proving some algorithm fails.

Some hard sciences are more open to failure than others. Good luck publishing
a negative result chemistry paper, with the unusual exception if the purpose
is to disprove someones previous published positive result paper.

Cranking it back to the article, although a "failure based curricula" would be
brilliant for teaching history, especially history of sciences, its a complete
waste of time for background stuff for average people. Its important for a
historian of chemistry to know people used to be really "into" the four
elements air water fire and earth, but probably not a good use of limited
teaching time to test everyone on it.

------
CodeMage
The author is conflating two different meanings of the word "failure": the act
(as in not succeeding at something) and the label (as in being labeled a
failure). The whole post is based on this fallacious logic.

The concept of "embracing failure" is precisely about learning that if you
fail at something, it doesn't mean you are a failure.

------
dmk23
I am a little surprised we are not hearing the points from this article more
often.

Yes, we can learn from failure and so on, nobody is disputing this. The
problem however is way too many people are taking a way too permissive and lax
attitude towards failure instead of trying to figure out how to succeed.
Permitting yourself to fail is the easy way out to avoid doing lots of hard
and gritty work. The best learning happens before you actually fail at
something, when you figure out you are ON THE PATH to failure and make a
course correction to avoid it.

The overall capital formation ecosystem is probably to blame for this lax
attitude. When the financiers make the most return from a few biggest winners
taking crazy risks they do not care about mean failure outcome in their
portfolio.

Remember, people who tell you it is OK to fail are not the ones who will have
to live with the consequences of you failing.

~~~
darkarmani
> The problem however is way too many people are taking a way too permissive
> and lax attitude towards failure instead of trying to figure out how to
> succeed.

Who are these people? I don't know anyone that is happy to fail.

> Remember, people who tell you it is OK to fail are not the ones who will
> have to live with the consequences of you failing.

I'm not sure if that is true. Plenty of parents are affected if their kids
fail at things.

------
xijuan
Anyone agrees with what he says in the article? I think I actually agree with
him somewhat. Statistically, the best predictor of future behaviour is past
behaviour. If you have always failed in the past, the probability of you
succeeding in the future would be low but not impossible.

~~~
Evbn
I bet you do great in the stock market.

------
perlpimp
I think what most of written world writes is to remove yourself from failure
thinking be result thinking instead - extract valuable information from what
underwater stones have you had encountered. So next time you can recognize
those.

So in general most of the promotion of failure is about learning and keeping
your mind open to be faster and more brazen next time - because you already
know where those traps are.

Usually complete failure consists of multiple failures - which is why it is
important to remove yourself from the situation whatever it is and give the
situation that caused it a complete analytic run down of the situation.

------
j45
There is a big difference between failing intelligently (being able to learn
from it) and failing recklessly (doing anything to avoid finding and doing the
things that matter).

The difference in recognizing this subtle but huge difference is a little bit
of maturity and constantly evolving one's ability to self-reflect.

Otherwise, it's easy wasting your 20's on ideas other people may cheer you on
but are a low percentage play, whereas you could spend the same time learning
what value, and creating measurable and verified value is.

------
tunesmith
My own sense of failure is in the purely scientific sense:

In order to have a meaningful idea, it has to be falsifiable. In other words,
it has to be a hypothesis, and testable.

Then you apply the test that would falsify it, and if the idea fails, you have
_learned_ something, and are able to focus your next hypothesis in a more
useful direction.

It sounds like the objections like this article completely miss the point of
that. It's not like we're telling people to go and do something random and
stupid and then trumpet about it.

------
sseefried
Has no one thought to ask what people mean by failure? I for one feel that
there could be a lot to be gained by decreasing the emotional impact of
failing, without going so far as to reduce people's desire to succeed.

It could be quite possible to fail (in objective terms), learn from your
mistakes and try again, without suffering the social stigma or emotional
impact of failure as that word tends to be understood.

------
akindolu
This post reminds a lot of a post by 37 signals' Jason Fried one time about
startups and failure. This days failure just seem sexy. Its never good and
cool to fail and will not. At no time should you plan or consider the option
of failing. Its like preparing for divorce on your first day of marriage and
then again I could be wrong.

------
butzopower
The Play mode he brings up at the end sounds like "fail fast" without the
structure of figuring out why you failed. There's no control over the failure,
just a lot of inputs and hoping you've targeted what's working.

Fail often / fail fast is just the scientific method made iterative.

------
Millennium
The trick isn't to fetishize failure. The trick is to move forward in spite of
the natural fear of failure.

------
jpxxx
No.

