Is “Failing Often and Fast” Good?
As you might have heard many times, we must fail a few times before we succeed. It makes sense, doesn’t it? … It is unlikely that we will achieve success on our first attempt at doing something. Everything new requires repetition and patience. However, don’t you think failure is becoming overrated?
I have heard many people be proud of how many times they have failed and had yet to give up. I am definitely guilty of this. Don’t get me wrong; there’s something to be proud of there. After all, they have taken a few hits and haven’t given up on the battle yet.
An issue on this that I am just starting to realize is that we are (at least I am) taking failure too lightly. For example, because there’s so much opportunity out there in the online space or other spaces, we tend to give up too quickly at the first sign of struggle and switch to another project that we think might be simpler. We then tell ourselves that we at least tried, and then throw it into our bucket of “failures.”
“Fail fast and fail often, and eventually you will succeed” is a quote that I have heard several times. I feel that these types of quotes influence these actions of giving up to early on whatever we are doing. I think that small failures make us feel good temporarily. They give us a sense that we are on the right track because we are failing often, as the quote states. However, are we really on the right track?
The right track is different for everybody, so I do not want to tell you what is the right path or not. However, one thing that I will say is that I do not think the “failing fast and often” motto is the best one we should follow to achieve success.
Why do I say this? … I have had that mentality for the past few years as I tried to pursue financial success. I have tried several things online and offline to improve my financial situation. Although, I know some of the things I tried could have got me that financial success I was searching for if I went all out on that one idea, I chose to switch to the next shiny object that appeared on my path. Then, I rationalized those actions as a failure and went on to the next “idea.”
So what is my solution to this issue? … I think we should focus on success rather than failures. For example, instead of thinking that the project we are working on might be another one of our failures, why not challenge ourselves to make sure this project is the one that succeeds. We can ask questions like “what do I need to change this time to make sure this project does not fail?” or “What changes do I need to make so that my customers love this?”
All we need to do is to change our failing-oriented mentality to a success-oriented one. In my opinion, this small mental switch must be made to fail less often and succeed more.
Yeah, the more failures we have before we “make it” could make a better life story. However, what if we could cut a few of the failure chapters and replace them with success and freedom ones, would you do it?
