How To Use Google’s Formula for Constant Failure To Become Wildly Successful

Why failing less isn’t the key to success.

It’s almost ten times harder to land a job at Google than it is to get into Harvard. So it might surprise you to learn that across the board, their employees earn a big fat “F” when it comes to successfully completing their work.

Why would a company that literally rejects millions of people each year be chock full of failures?

This isn’t due to lazy managers — like everything else at Google, they’ve gotten success to down to an exact formula, and it involves a grade we’d be terrified to show our parents on a report card.

Let me explain.

At Google, each employee sets a goal and three key outcomes that result from meeting that goal. At the end of the quarter, each Googler receives a grade based on metrics between 0 and 1 on each result. The ideal situation is that an employee will have an average between a .6 and a .7, but scoring a 1 on a result is a really bad sign. Yep — their star employees earn a 60% success rate.

How will failing more make you a lot more successful?

As Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google, explained, “In order to set these ambitious goals and have them be credible, you also have to realize they’re not all going to be successful.”

Because perfectly meeting all goals is not the expectation at Google, this leaves their employees room to be very ambitious, and yes, at times, to fail.

And outside of the world of Google, Harvard Business looked at over 50,000 employees, and they found that every A-player had a similar way of setting their own personal achievements.

Or, as J.K Rowling put it best, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.”

How to be a successful failure:

Set scary goals

Remember: if your goals aren’t scaring you, you’re not growing.

Your goals should be big enough and audacious enough that they force you to grow. Does your goal stretch you? Does your goal somewhat scare you? If you answered “yes”, then you have a goal that’s solid gold.

To do this, give yourself (or your team) permission to reach higher than you can grab. Remove your fear of failure by setting audacious goals that are outside your reach, but still achievable by some sort of miracle. You’ll be amazed by how far you end up reaching.

Define the right successes

Obviously, Google still gets a lot done, and they can’t have their servers be down 40% of the time. If you’re an employee, you can’t screw up an important project, and as an employer you don’t want employees making really expensive mistakes.

That’s why Google sets their success rate at 60% instead of “whatever you feel like.”

Even if you don’t want to carry around a calculator all the time, you can do something similar.

For instance, at my firm, everything involving our clients must be 100% correct and on time. That’s what I’ve deemed an inexcusable failure, and we have systems in place already for these processes. But when we’re trying to stretch our wings and improve these processes, or anything else, failure is acknowledged but not frowned upon.

Start by defining what’s already in place and a must-have in your success journey, and define what can take you even farther. Give yourself permission to fail at the right things, and always try your hardest at everything.

Move the needle

Imagine a car’s speedometer: we can’t just tap the gas and go from zero to sixty in an instant, but by continually pushing we can always keep moving the needle. Every push helps us get up to speed.

By taking the time to evaluate your progress, you can move the needle too. Every month, week, day, whatever, lock yourself in a room and take the time to look at your successes and see how you can set your sights even higher.

And yes, even look at your failures too. Keep a “failure file” — not to ruminate on missed opportunities, but as a reminder of those times you decided to reach higher and bigger. It can show you that despite those rejections, you’re still here, and that you can still keep reaching for the stars.

If you enjoyed this article, you can read more of my thoughts in my column for Inc. as well as my latest project, Love The Hustle.