What Is The Failure Paradox?
You have to fail more to succeed more. Our greatest periods of growth often stem directly from our greatest moments of failure.
Welcome to ANB. The internet show where we feed your curiosity with bite-sized pieces of knowledge. Today's topic: What is the Failure Paradox?
Failure. Don’t like it. Can’t live without it. What a paradox.
However, failure is not something to be ashamed of. There may be times where you struggle to succeed, and success stories that you hear make you think, "what am I doing wrong?". Don't be discouraged. Most of the time, you're only seeing the end result. You don't see all the risks that were taken and the failures that were made to get to that point. One must first fail in order to succeed.
Of course, human beings do not like to fail, but we learn more from failure than we learn from success. We want to fail so that we can move from robustness to resilience. What that means is that we can detect failure early, recover from it quickly, and exploit our learning.
There is no shame in reflecting and sharing your failures. If we only talk about success, then:
We discourage people from taking risks by working on ideas that may fail.
We would be encouraged by the system to hide things that are failing.
We perpetuate the myth that success can be guaranteed if we only have the right people working in the right way.
and Failure becomes a corporate disease that we need to distance ourselves from.
There is a distinction between things that are “safe to fail”, and those that are “unsafe to fail”. The problem is that people get so worried about failing on the big, unsafe stuff, that they refuse to entertain failure on the small, "safe to fail" stuff.
Instinctively, we want to succeed every time, but as a result we do 2 things:
Number 1: We lower the bar on what success is - we end up aiming to “avoid failure” instead of aiming for excellence;
Number 2: We stop taking risks - the associated cost of failure means we play it safe every time; we look to find a way to avoid failure completely and miss the opportunities to back our “1 in a million” idea.
Failure can break you but it can also make you. If we really want to succeed in everything, then we need to change our goals. We can only succeed in large meaningful ways if we are prepared to take frequent small risks, and learn from them, allowing us to get more and more successful by building on the learning we got by failing.
Narrated by: Kashieu
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