Dramatizing Failure is Dumb

There’s a new school of thought floating around that has to do with failure. And I think that’s really, really awesome. Think about it this way:

If you carefully think through your past failures, you’re less likely by far to make the same mistakes twice. — John David Back

Unrelated but fun: Now, let me show you a picture of a kid that I found when I was trying to search the word ‘broken.’ Apparently this little son of a gun was a cat burglar (no he didn’t burgle cats, per se) in like the late 1800’s. Look at this little G! Our crooks today look like they are strung out on meth or ate half a pound of bath salts. This kid looks like he goes to Sunday School and then robs the nuns. Props to you, Henry.

Henry Leonard Stephenson — nothing at all to do with this post

If you read a lot of Medium posts, which you probably do, you’ll see the same sort of thing from startup founders all day long “We failed a bunch of times before we got successful.”

Great! Go fuck up! Go burn shit to the ground. Go launch something that’s terrible and beg everyone to look at it.

Then take all your failures while they are fresh and write them down. Get the rest of your team to write them down.

Didn’t have the right API
Didn’t go through the right traction channels
Didn’t have enough money
Didn’t hire the right designer
Didn’t buy toilet paper and got a rash

Once you do that, and you compile all your notes down, you’ll see that you have a lot of overlap. Apparently everyone thinks having toilet paper or not is a huge issue. Take those notes into your next planning meeting and READ THEM FIRST. Use that shit. It’s great strategy. Let that guide you.

Okay that’s all I have to say about that.