Are you a failure?
My wife told me the other day that she was surprised by the number of Elon Musk’s past business failures. I was surprised too but for a different reason; I expected there to be more!
If you want to be successful at anything, you’ve got to fail (or at least suck) at it first…it’s part of the process. I reckon I could apply that hypothesis to anything that I’m currently capable of doing. Failure is also the part of the learning process which protects us and others.
Think about the pilot in the flight simulator crashing into the side of a mountain. Think about your code and the hundreds of error messages you will see before you ever get let loose on production code. No one wants the pilot to be facing that mountain scenario for the first time in a real plane carrying real passengers. No one wants us to see a certain error message for the first time AFTER it has hit production.
This is a week in which Sam Bankman-Frieds FTX crypto exchange went down in flames and Elizabeth Holmes was jailed for 11 years for fraud. They have two things in common; they’ve cost other people billions of dollars and neither of them has prior experience of business failure. The first time they failed was right into the side of the mountain.
I suspect both of them were in denial and I’m certain that both feared being seen as a failure more than they feared costing other people a shit load of cash. As adults our fear of failure is often really a fear of being judged.
Children don’t really have this and that’s why they pick things up so quickly…they just keep going like no one is watching. Can you imagine if a child stopped trying to walk the first time they fell down and just decided that walking wasn’t for them?
It’s no coincidence that the best developers I’ve worked with are also the ones that make the most mistakes. You won’t make mistakes if you stay in your comfort zone and don’t try anything new. You won’t make mistakes if you leave the ugly stuff, the experimentation, and the uncharted territory to others.
Average folks leave failure to others.
This is my favorite quote on the relationship between failure and success:
“I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed” - Michael Jordan
Cheers
Gary
Comments
Post a Comment