Friday the 13th, March 2015. An ominous day.

It’s late afternoon and I’m staring at my computer. My kickstarter campaign for a book I wrote while in the woods the summer before is approaching it’s last day. It will officially end tomorrow at 10am.

This is what I am staring at…

While staring at my screen, I recall a conversation with someone earlier in the week. It went something like this:

Me: “We are going to get 50 people over 2 days to attend our brilliant workshop on blah, blah, blah…”

Polite Person listening to me go on about my venture: “Wow. That sounds exciting, we have a team of 4 and it takes us 6 months to get 30 people onto our free course with a huge brand behind us.”

Me: Gulp. “Oh.”

For some reason I had been unable to see the ridiculous goal we had set ourselves. Thinking we could attract 50 clients in London to attend a day long event about an innovation they had never heard about, given by two guys they had never heard about — ha!

Back at my computer — a weird calm is coming over me. I should be panicking; my book project is a FAIL and my seminars designed to spread the messages in the book are a FAIL.

How many people did I tell? Err, who doesn’t know about these projects?

But, the weird thing is…

I feel fabulous. I feel better than anytime over the last 3 years!

It’s a feeling of euphoria that is morphing into excitement. I realise I’m not failing.

Wait….what?

But, surely this is what failure looks like: by Saturday morning I will own an unfunded Kickstarter project, I will own two cancelled events in London and I will own an idea without a business model.

The lightbulb is a result.

It took more than 6,000 iterations to find the right filament to make the lightbulb at residential scale economically viable. Six Thousand. Do you think the team working with Thomas Edison thought about each unsuccessful attempt prior to the carbonised bamboo filament as a failure?

I doubt it.

How could you go on after 1,000 or even 5,000 if you embraced the current meme that suggests all of these attempts are failures? But, forget about the emotional toll of all that failure — how difficult would it be to learn from some many failures?

We only have to look at the words used to describe the work of people like Edison to see that failure is not part of the vernacular. We use terms like ‘scientific discovery’, ‘finding’, ‘invention’ and ‘creation’. This is the language of imagination and adventure.

The lightbulb became a reality for millions because a team in Menlo Park, New Jersey were determined to experiment. The funny thing about experiments, they don’t really yield failures or successes — rather they yield results.

Think back to 10th grade chemistry.

Hypothesis. Experiment. Result.

If the result doesn’t match the hypothesis, you are still learning. In fact, some of the most exciting discoveries occurred when a result didn’t match the hypothesis.

French scientist Henri Becquerel thought uranium crystals burned an image on photographic plates because of focussed sunlight. When the clouds ‘ruined’ his experiment he discovered how wrong his hypothesis was — the result is the discovery of radioactivity.

Why should business or enterprise be any different than science? We have some data, predictions, testing and results. Perhaps it’s sexy to say I had four failures that led to one monster success? I think a phoenix rising from the ashes probably sounds more mythical than “I experimented for six years and the result is my current success.”

The Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 set out to prove the existence of a luminiferous aether. Unfortunately, they proved there wasn’t. Einstein told us why 18 years later. But, Michelson won the Nobel Prize for Physics due to the result of his awesome experiment (and body of work) — that was launched with a wrong hypothesis.

And sometimes what looks like failure is simply a discovery not yet made. A tribe not yet connected. Think Rowling, Tolkien, Hemingway and King. Great writers who were denied publication or took a long time to find their tribe.

A smaller experiment.

In the final episode of documentary style podcast series, we hear the founder of a promising startup make the following statement…

“We are now focusing on being a great dating app.”

— Founder of Dating Ring when she decides her venture is just a lifestyle business. Datingring.com was featured on Gimlet’s second season of the podcast Startup.

The ultimate failure is, apparently, declaring your business a lifestyle business. According to anyone interesting in tech startups, which is apparently anybody who is anyone.

A lifestyle business is a business that cannot support massive external investment. It is not, by definition, a failed business. And the more we focus on failing fast to get big, to avoid the lifestyle business model, the more we potentially miss.

I fear this obsession with failure, which relies on discarding so many ideas, is blinding us from seeing the fantastic results of so many experiments. How many results are hidden from view because they were dumped onto the garbage pile of failure?