Embracing failure is an oddly effective way to ultimately succeed. This does not mean just hoping everything goes well, winging it, ignoring it, or just bracing for impact.
Embracing failure means adopting a system where we can test our assumptions (and we blindly make huge assumptions at work all the time) in a series of small, non-bet-the-farm experiments. We craft a small, clearly incomplete guess at the product, process, service, or message. Next we put it out there to see what happens. Whatever happens, we will learn. Then we use that learning to adjust our offering and start the cycle again.
We can fail our way to success into any part of our work if we start small and think cycles.
In your corner,
Mike
PS: This approach can be tough because we are so used to thinking linearly. If you tend to think top-down, get it right straight away, try imagining this series of learning cycles as forming a line through time.
One thought on “Fail Your Way to Success”
I like this, because it also frees you from the demon of 20/20 hindsight. Instead of blaming yourself for getting it wrong, it reframes the failure as an evolution of information. You made the best choice you could with the info available at the time, and NOW, from the failure, you have more info and better insight – and you needed the failure to get it. So the failure was a good thing!