Fail fast and frequently
The greatest innovations are the product of even greater failures — building a culture where people feel comfortable trying things that might fail, starts with the senior leaders’ attitudes and role modeling.
Odds are, your first venture or product will not be successful — not because I don’t personally believe it’s possible, but because the odds are not in your favor. The path to success is not a linear trajectory — similar to climbing Everest, you have to continuously ascend and descend, or you’ll fall to the elements.
This is why it is paramount to embrace and wallow in your failures; they’re absolutely inevitable. It’s what you do with them that matters. As humans, we have a natural tendency to avoid negative elements in our lives, so first, to learn from our failures, you have to change the way you view them. I’m touching slightly on Dr. Carol Dweck’s fixed and growth mindsets, so I’ll summarize the thesis.
Growth mindset:
“Failure is an opportunity to grow.”
Fixed mindset:
“Failure is the limit of my abilities.”
I won’t get much further into the subject than that, but I do encourage everyone to read the philosophy — I wanted to set the baseline for individuals who embrace failures; those referred to as having the growth mindset. As entrepreneurs, you absolutely must have this mindset — if you don’t, there are no exceptions to this rule, you’re limiting yourself from ever reaching success (and probably never will).
Back to embracing failures — by accepting and allowing ourselves to fail, we can learn from our mistakes and strengthen our weaknesses, thus improving the odds of reaching success.
We have all heard of Thomas Edison’s 1,000 failures before the lightbulb was invented. What if he had given up during any one of those attempts? How long I wonder before we would have the innovations we have today. Edison never viewed any of his ‘failed’ attempts as failures:
“I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” — Thomas Edison.
Growth mindset as its finest.
In my journey, I’ve failed countless times, whether that be something related to programming, communication, meeting deadlines, or investing time and energy on the wrong projects — all of this defines who I am now, and I am so grateful for all of the opportunities I’ve had to fail. I look forward to making many more mistakes, and embracing all of them.
As important as it is to fail frequently, it’s equally as important to fail as fast as you can. A couple months back, I was having this conversation with my great colleague and business partner, Raj — we were discussing uncertainties with the application we were developing and as we faced more and more complex obstacles, we felt unsure of our odds of reaching success. It was Raj who said if we’re going to fail, we need to fail fast — meaning, let’s not waste unnecessary resources and time on something that we aren’t sure of. This is a core principle of following the Lean business model. Test your assumptions with as little resources as possible.
My experience is companies are generally poor at creating a culture in which employees feel comfortable enough to try things that may fail. This hinders innovation and creativity. It starts with the senior leaders’ attitude — if upper management created an atmosphere where employees felt comfortable to try things, there would be all sorts of new ideas and innovations!
Times are changing whether you like it or not, and the war for talent will be a major talking point for stagnant mega-companies. If they do not adopt and effectively implement healthy, positive, innovation-centric cultures, they will not survive. Hopefully this will rid the world of many of the companies around today!
With my own company, I created a cultural roadmap, where I have a plan to implement certain mechanics as to create a failure-is-okay environment. Our organization is also what is referred to as a flatarchy — a structure in which leadership lines and communication are flatter than your traditional hierarchy (dying model), however, employees are able to break away from the structure, raise internal investment for a project/innovation, and create a new group within the organization to execute their idea. This is in an effort to encourage intrapreneurship.
Fail fast and fail frequently! It’s fundamental growth to your trajectory and will better your odds at success. It starts with a growth mindset: understanding that failure is an opportunity to strengthen.
