Case for failing fast and often only if you are failing smart

3 ways on how to fail smart and increase your odds of success

Failing fast does not necessarily mean you will succeed but failing smartly will increase your odds of success.

The popular mantra fail fast, fail often has been widely adopted throughout the world now — not only for products and teams but also personal development. It inspired me a lot as well when I heard about it from Steve Jobs (I think it was him), it inspired me to take more risks and become less risk averse. It helped me be more calculated about how I took risks but not too reliant on those calculations.

There is a lot of truth in how different cultures have different risk taking behaviour. For instance, firms that are formed in countries with high individualistic personalities (western countries usually) are known to take more risks domestically than when it’s not the case. From personal experience however, I have seen this first hand.

Coming from India, I can attest to the fact that safety was valued a lot more than risks and failures in the society I grew up in. It was common place to see actions being judged on the outcome (one of the most common biases, if you want to see what you miss when you do that, read here). Although my little opening to risk taking was because of my family. We belong to a generation of risk-takers. My dad always encouraged taking risks and being intuitive about the things I chose to spend my time on.

I believe the fail fast fail often philosophy did lower the bar to take that first leap of risk however I soon realised that just failing is not enough, its really about the learning you get out of the failures that make this mantra work. Many times when we fail, we point the reasons to externalities that are not under our control. If we failed at an exam — this year’s questions were difficult or didn’t follow the pattern, If we don’t stick to eating healthy, because there was junk food in the drawer, etc. Although these reasons help us then sleep at night, they don’t allow for you to fail often and keep learning, the blame game does not allow you to fail smartly.

There are three things you can do, when you want to make sure you fail smartly the next time you fail —

1. Understand the time effect and think long term — sometimes we judge our failures quickly. We jump to conclusions and miss out on very important details that we could have learned from. Next time you fail, think about how will you be describing this failure 5 years down the line, how would that story look like. Think hard about what and how this failure could affect your thinking 5 years later. Especially when we have a personal failure, we find our lives and thoughts crashing down at the prospect of losing complete control but within a reasonable time frame of 5 years or so, we know that life will go on. Thinking 5 years down the line allows you to have perspective and focus on your long term well being.
2. Don’t leave any learnings on the table — when you fail next time and don’t get what you think you deserved, think about what transpired. Think hard about what you can learn out of the situation that led to your failure. Maybe you failed to get through that interview, instead of cursing the hiring manager, think about your actions. Think hard about what you could have potentially done to better your chances? Perhaps more preparation, maybe you didn’t care enough to follow up with the hiring person, etc. Make sure that you take a note of your learning and the circumstances, not mentally but in a small notebook that reminds you of what you learnt there. There are rarely any failures out of which you cannot learn at all. Even if you had a bad experience with an absolutely crazy hiring manager, think about what could you have done to be aware of that situation (if anything)?
3. Be open enough for discovering other learnings which are outside your view — sometimes, we wear a single coloured lens towards our issues and situation. Running by the situation with someone who is not involved as much as you are, more often than not provides you with a very fresh perspective. Try and be open enough to discover these new perspectives, you don’t have to trust them over yours but discovering these perspectives adds another layer of thinking to your next failure.

Once you have these three characteristics in your failures, go ahead fail fast and fail often but make sure you are failing smart.