The Infinite Loops Guide To... Failure
"This might sound very irresponsible, but I don't know what I'm doing" ~ Hong Sangsoo
1. Alex Komoroske | Admit That You Have No Idea
“So many people, I think, are driven by this insecurity of, ‘People will know I'm dumb or will know I don't know what I'm doing.’ And there's something so liberating in saying, ‘Yeah, I have no idea what I'm doing.’ I don't think any of us do really. We're just doing the best we can and we're trying to learn from it and take actions that over time, we get smarter and we understand and we develop an intuition about what kinds of ripple effects will likely come out of a certain thing. On a very fundamental level, in looking at even deep learning systems or any formal information theory or evolutionary biology, you just can't learn if you don't try and fail.”
More from Alex: Complex Adaptivity All The Way Down (Ep. 208)| Batman Was Wrong (our synthesis)2. Dr. Julie Gurner | Adopt an Internal Locus of Control
“[M]ost people will fear failure, not because it's failure, but because of other people seeing them fail […] [W]hen you have an internal locus of control, it puts you in a position to take more chances and risk because the only person you really risk disappointing is yourself. And that's usually very tolerable because we watch ourselves fail at things all the time. A child that is learning to walk and falls down doesn't go, ‘Oh, well now I've fallen, so now I can never step again.’ […] And so there is a lot that we, if you can move with an internal locus of control, external things can happen. They come and go. You can take those hits very easily […] You have the freedom to iterate, to try, to fail, to just move forward and to do other things.”
More from Dr. Gurner: Ultra Successful (Ep. 176)| Five Paths to Peak Performance (our synthesis)3. Luca Dellanna | Avoid Game-Over Fail States
“In the book, I use the example of my cousin who's a skier. And he was an excellent skier, very young. He made it to the World Cup for his world record, and then a couple of injuries stopped his career very early. And the lesson I got from him is that it's not the fastest skier who wins the race, but the fastest one of those who finish the race. And the principle will be that survival matters a lot for performance.”
More from Luca: On Survival, Signals & Success (Ep. 174)4. Jim O’Shaughnessy | Own Your Mistakes
“The point is simple—mistakes provide a lesson-rich environment. But you’ve got to own your mistakes. You’d be compounding them if you tried to point your finger at anything or anyone other than yourself. The most successful people I’ve met have usually also been the ones who not only made the most mistakes but also always owned them. If you have the ability to say ‘I was wrong’ and truly believe and learn from it, you’re close to gaining a new superpower in life.”
More from Jim on failure: Mistakes were Made. (And, Yes, by Me.)5. Jeremiah Lowin | Make Original Mistakes
“If you go out and all you do is make the same mistakes that I could have gotten in some other company, then there's no ROI on this investment […] I can buy those mistakes somewhere else. I think that, in some ways, this pursuit of original mistakes is sort what one is doing as a startup founder in a constructive way, right? […] It's a huge red flag if someone goes out believing that they're going to do things right. It is one of the most dangerous attitudes […] Our skillset is to go out, encounter a mistake, which we must, because we're trying to do something new. We must not do it perfectly at first. It's ludicrous to think we would do it perfectly. Second, that is how we do it and encounter that mistake and fix it and move on to the next one. That's the skillset over and over and over that I think we need to optimize for.”
6. Anna Lorena Fabrega | Encourage Others to Fail
"[I]f you really think about it, failure should be something that we encourage, not punish. And the way that we approach failure in school, it's like we make kids fear failure, so what happens is they don't want to take risks, right? Because there's a consequence for taking risks. They don't want to try out new ideas and they're not very certain. There's not this notion of, ‘Let me try something. I failed. Let me try again. Let me get better.’ You don't go through that process in school. And this is very detrimental because in the real world, that's how you come up with crazy new ideas, that's how you innovate by getting comfortable with failure. And I often think if kids don't have a chance to fail, often as kids, when they really don't have big responsibilities or life-changing consequences, then when are they going to practice this skill…”
More from Ana: Gamification of Learning (Ep. 76)7. Jimmy Soni | Are You Taking Enough Creative Risk?
“Michael Jordan left basketball to play baseball and it didn't go exactly as he had planned, there were a bunch of reasons why. And then the baseball strike happened and he starts playing with the Bulls again […] That to me is actually not a story about him getting back to the thing he was good at. It's a story about somebody who had the courage to try something that they thought they might fail in, and that's amazing. He was the best basketball player in the world […] as one person put it in that Last Dance documentary, maybe the best person to do anything ever in anything. And he says, ‘I'm going to abandon all of that and I'm going to go do this thing because my dad always thought that I should be a baseball player and I love my dad and I love baseball. I'm going to try that.’ And he puts on a White Sox uniform and he almost makes it. And that, talk about the courage. You have Nike contracts. The world is watching you. People admire you. Literally, the entire planet thinks of you as an icon and you're like, ‘I'm going to go play baseball.’ It blows my mind. And it makes me think, ‘Boy, maybe I'm not taking enough creative risk.’"
More from Jimmy: The Courage of Creative Risk (Ep. 214) | Make Things, and Be Playful (Ep.108) | Unleashing the Future of Publishing (Ep. 157)8. Frederik Gieschen | No One Really Cares
“I think we overestimate the cost of failure. First of all, I think the Internet for the most part, unless it's really meme-able, forgets very quickly. That people just move on and there's something new happening every day, every week. I think what you might find is you might find yourself with people who are envious of your success and who become sort of public detractors, right? I think that does happen. Whether you call it trolls or something else, right? You might have specific people who will keep pointing out your failure. But […] I think people are in general somewhat forgiving of failure. Unless you're stealing, or you're doing something that's obviously wrong. But if you had the best intentions and people follow along in your journey, my hope is that people are forgiving and that it overall creates a better culture to try things out.”
More from Frederik: Learning and Failing in Public (Ep. 85) | On Agility, Agreeableness, Alchemy & the Arena (Ep. 177)