How to learn from failure
Failures doesn’t always mean you were wrong
I’ve always been a fan of hearing failure stories, picking apart my own failures to learn from it, to not repeat them.
I’m even somewhat biased towards failures more than success stories. I prefer the raw, gritty, vulnerability of being honest and public about what we did wrong, over the glossy celebrations of wins.
It’s like… I see an MRR screenshot on Twitter, I almost yawn out loud. If it’s a friend, I feel a moment of gladness for them and reply with an obligatory congrats. Then move on as quickly as I came. But if I see a tweet about a failure story, man, those engagement minutes on tweet are gonna shoot way up high.
But sometimes the obsession with learning from mistakes can be unhelpful. Annie Duke in her book Thinking In Bets, talks about the failure of learning from failures:
You’re not always right when things go your way; you’re not always wrong when they don’t.
Failures doesn’t always mean you were wrong.
Take a minute to take that in.
This is especially through in non-linear, chaotic games like entrepreneurship. Trying to learn too much from failure and potentially adding lessons where there might be none can be as harmful as narrative-shaping your win from hindsight.
So the best way to learn from failure as just improve the process where there were obvious gaps, but don’t over-analyse on the severity or outcome, because there could have been many other factors outside of our control in that failure.
And then just keep calm and carry on.
Without any additional baggage.