Ideas in the Wild: Andrew Thorp King Is Optimizing Failure With 5 Powerful Rules

Failure can ruin lives and families. There’s no denying it. It can destroy health and obliterate self-esteem. But it also holds a lot of value on the road to success. FAILURE RULES! walks through five essential rules that help pull value from any failure — as proven by Andrew Thorp King’s personal stories of dramatic, cascading failures in business, relationships, art, and life.

The experience and immediate tangible results of failure suck. But as Andrew shows, if we follow the rules of failure — seeing beyond the mess and picking through the good stuff left in the rubble — we can move forward into success. I recently caught up with Andrew to learn more about why he wrote the book and the ideas he shares with readers.

Why did you write this book?

Let’s face it: failure really blows.

I didn’t write this book to worship at the twisted altar of self-indulgent, willful failure. There is no lesson, no discovery, and no value in that. But failure that is unintended, stridently fought against, creatively challenged, and humbly accepted when emerging inevitable, is valuable.

I wrote this book to speak to this type of failure. Failure happens to us all. It has different levels of visitation for each of us. When it comes, we need to revere it. Before it arrives, we need to plan how we will greet it. In anticipation of it striking, we need to decide ahead of time how we will handle it.

We need to manage our fear of it with reason and strategy. When it hits us, we will likely only be lowered to the level of our preparedness, not strengthened to rise to the intensity of its challenges. So it behooves us all to prepare for it.

To do this, you must essentially become a failure prepper. This is why I wrote this book. Through it, I hope to encourage you to thoughtfully let failure break you when you encounter it so that it not only does not kill you, but it makes you stronger than ever at the broken places — like a hydra that doubles its strength when it is harmed. When you learn to be a failure prepper, you will learn how to optimize each new failure that breaks you.

FAILURE RULES! is your field manual to help you look at your failures, discuss them with yourself, and guide you into putting yourself back together better on the other side of your failures.

What’s an idea you share that really excites you?

When failure strikes, sometimes all it takes to endure, conquer, and move forward through it — and bypass unnecessary delay — is to hyper-focus on at least one area of positive micro-momentum. If you are encountering an avalanche of failures in quick succession, whether it’s in your pursuit, your life, or even your failure recovery plan, latch your stubborn fingers onto the saving cliff of identified positive momentum.

What do I mean by this? If you are at the front end of a startup endeavor and your burn rate is nearing the end of its runway, find the right trajectory levers that can extend that runway. Pull those levers, and fall into sustainable momentum.

If you’re carrying business debt that is weighing on your balance sheet while you wait for critical revenue ignition to materialize in your P&L, find the mechanisms of momentum that keep you moving, both financially and emotionally. If you’re hustling toward the development of a skill on the side, keep working for free to develop that skill as long as you have meaningful momentum.

Learn to strategically work for free by catching momentum. Learn to cultivate conditions that facilitate the achievement of flow states — they lead to momentum. Draft your plans with an intent to iterate — that will help you catch momentum, too.

Momentum is the cure for the sting of failure. As failure purifies your pursuit’s meaningless waste products, what’s left can survive if momentum exists. Momentum and the flow states that sustain and increase it are the key to outrunning the initial brutality of failure’s purification.

How will following your advice improve your readers’ lives?

None of us are exempt from failing. But, once you learn the five rules of failure, you will be able to rise, phoenix-like, from the scorched ashes of your failures. You will be able to smile and take courage as you live each new day with a renewed understanding that your worth and your failures are not correlative.

No longer will you need to sit unnecessarily still under the positive pressure of entrepreneurial or creative ambition because you are waiting for some certainty of outcome or because you’re paralyzed by a fear of failure. You will know what to do to keep moving forward when the inevitable failures punctuate your pursuits.

You will be able to protect your idealism — while defiantly rejecting cynicism — no matter the magnitude of failure you’re contending with. When you hit failure rocks in the stream of your calling journey, you will be able to let those rocks push you into adventurous new streams instead of sinking you.

Perhaps most important of all, when you implement the five rules of failure into your life, you will be able to boldly make your way as an entrepreneur, a creative, or an authentic Being. Yes, there will be times when you need to accept — even induce — division to forge forward with integrity as your authentic self. This takes boldness because you will fail to be all things to all people. But with the five rules of failure tattooed on your soul, you will always remember that this is a byproduct of greatness — and you will forge ahead confidently as the earthly CEO of your life.