The fastest way to success might be to fail first

"We live in an age where there is so much pressure to succeed."

Shouldn't we bring this pressure to succeed into question? It seems that the only criteria for defining 'success' is the monetary aspect of it. We freeze in reverence if a corporation publishes its newest financial statement that sets another record and don't care what practices might have been involved to get there. This single-sided definition of success is going to end up in a blind alley.

To SusanE's point, wasn't it Edison who claimed to have experienced 1,000 failures for every success? I think it's a personality trait that's ingrained in our DNA. Some prefer to play it safe, and will never capture the brass ring, while others fear not the implications of failure, and by way of trying, have the opportunity to hit on something great. Kinda like the lottery... you can't win if you don't play.

Learning the deadliest mistakes or say mistakes will certainly helps us lead success! I would say a failure always emerges you to keep out of the situation and thus lead to think about the better opportunities around you!

If you gotta fail, fail fast.

That's how you learn after all =)

They say, well someone said, an expert is someone who has made the most mistakes, in any given field, or something like that. great article. Like the person above I am a slow learner as well, and it sometimes takes me a few tries, sometimes at the same exact thing to learn I am doing something wrong. Sorta like insanity. doing the same thing expecting different results. But once I learn, I learn for good. :)
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My Dad used to tell us kids "Don't go about something half-cocked". No one likes to be seen as a dumbass, hence 'fear of failure'. Inventors keep on trying because they are trying to build a new something or other. (if nothing else, people respect their tenacity). What keeps most of us from trying many approaches to problem solving is fear of LOOKING like a failure.

It seems a waste of time to make my own mistakes. I am a slow learner. Personally, it's quicker for me to learn from the mistakes of others.

Steve, I think it's your job to learn from it and that's why many CEO's or gurus don't give answers to their learning from mistakes (well, some do). If we are told answers, the experience of figuring out the correct solution does not get ingrained into us. If you figure out the solution on your own it gets ingrained and the lesson is truly learned - so as not to make the same mistake again. It's something like, "if you give someone a fish they will eat, but if you teach them to fish they will never go hungry."

I've found a lot of reasons there are so many failures is because the wrong expectations are set. I think clients look for one or two tangible short term measures. Multiple tactics and new approaches are often only measurable over the long haul. We can hope that as Wall Street rebuilds and the market grows back that CEOs and CMOs will stay patient and continue to learn from the failures.

The only way to innovate is to try something, see the outcome and adjust accordingly. I look at any new venture in this way, and ,yes, sometimes the outcome is not positive. Getting beyond the "failure" mindset and moving toward thinking "what did I learn from the process" works for any learning environment, whether it be corporate, small business, or the education of children/teens.
Thanks for reminder.

It seems to me most people are confused about what all this "acceptance of failure as the path to success" talk means. (They've been listening to innovation gurus.) Edward, you and your CEO friend have nailed it however. It's all about the learning. But there's a catch. Too often today when people embrace this "love of failure" they assume that the learning part is always automatic, obvious and effortless. It is none of those things. But it's absolutely critical to moving forward. Without the learning, you have absolutely nothing but a failure. My personal frustration with the gurus is that they spend all their time carping about loving failure, and none of it teaching us how to learn from it.

Failures truly are opportunities to regroup and try something new. It's an educational process.

While it took me many years, in honesty decades to get that concept, once I finally grabbed hold of it my successes began to tumble in quickly and efficiently.

I applaud all who voice their failures and lessons learned. It makes the road traveled for the rest of us a bit more smooth

My favourite Chinese proverb re: Failure -
"Failure lies not in falling down, but in not getting up." - This proverb is on my desktop so that I see it every morning when I turn on the laptop :)

Your post made me feel like I was getting a *pat, pat* on the back of my shoulder. I have moments where I feel like the world is ending when I fail at something. Lately, I've said to myself, "people have it worse then you do, so get up and move forward (not sure if that's very nice to think)."

Thanks for this, I instantly connected with it. I've got a feeling that a lot of people will be plugging in their favourite failure quotes ;)

One of my favorite quotes is how we are "dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants." It speaks to the fact that we can learn from the collective knowledge of those who acted before us.

As it appears in the tosaphist Isaiah di Trani:
"Who sees further a dwarf or a giant? Surely a giant for his eyes are situated at a higher level than those of the dwarf. But if the dwarf is placed on the shoulders of the giant who sees further? ... So too we are dwarfs astride the shoulders of giants. We master their wisdom and move beyond it. Due to their wisdom we grow wise and are able to say all that we say, but not because we are greater than they."

I believe the philosophers got it half right. These "giants" aren't just our predecessors, but our own failures. If we can stand on the back of every failure we've made, if we can use what we've learned to push closer to success, then it's from the shoulders of our own failure that we grow all the wiser for it.

That said, why fear failure?

Fearing failure is the same as fearing the answers that bring us closer to success. To fear failure is to request paralysis and inertia. We don't have to embrace failure--it doesn't feel all that good to fail--but we should never fear it.

Great post - through fails (trial and error) indeed we learn - and we learn for a lifetime, everything else is hypotesis, theory and needs to be proven - and through failure it is proven :)
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I'm a big, big believer in the need for failure on the road to success. Sounds a little cliche, but if I had been born a tennis player with a perfect fore and back swing, I would never have failure as the catalyst for improvement. What was that famous line by Michael Jordan? Something like "Many times I have failed to put the basket in the net. And that's why I succeed."
It's interesting that "risk" has negative connotations, and yet risk is a necessary ingredient in both failure (which I see as a positive) and success.
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