You Should Be Working On Much Bigger Failures Right Now
Or, why most of us aren’t willing to fail
“If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now. I am not kidding. Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.”
That’s Jeff Bezos after Amazon’s flagship product the Fire Phone absolutely bombed in the market. When I read this line back in 2016, it felt like a gimmick audacious billionaires play to show boldness. But the more I thought about it, and especially after I got a better idea about how Bezos runs Amazon from The Everything Store, I started to understand the deep wisdom hidden in this simple punchline.
You see, when you fail the first time, it’s kind of a big deal. My first business was a total failure. I spent one year on an idea that went nowhere. I didn’t deal with it very well. But the truth is, if you are trying to do something new, you are bound to fail once in a while. The trick is not to stop there, and work towards even bigger failures.
The Airbnb guys did it the best. Airbnb didn’t take off the first time they launched, but they didn’t stop there. They launched over and over again. Every time they failed, they tried again with a different strategy. Now, more than 10 years later, each failure is a blip compared to the massive success they’ve had. Jeff Bezos meant something similar. You have to strive to make your failures insignificant.
But to be honest, most of us aren’t willing to fail. We may understand intellectually that we are bound to fail once in a while if we are trying to do something different, but most of us aren’t ready to take that punch to the gut, the blow to ego, the stigma, and the self-doubt that comes with failure.
Like the Albert King song, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” the paradox of success is that everybody wants to be successful, but nobody wants to fail to get there.
But since the path to success isn’t straightforward—with lots of dark alleys and dead ends—failure always lurks just around the corner. Therefore, like the Agents in The Matrix, avoiding failure is impossible.
Take the career path of a comedian. On paper, it’s pretty straightforward. You get up on stage and crack jokes. To really be successful, you have to really be good because there are millions like you—both struggling and established—hence the creative competition is huge. Unless you carve out a niche that only you can have, it would be impossible to stay in any creative game. The safest path to avoid failure would be copying jokes or mimicking what has worked in the past, but it obviously wouldn’t get you anywhere near success either.
Creating new material isn’t easy. Even the best of the best comedians have their fair share of bad days. Jokes that get no laughs and narratives that cannot hold the material together. But the bad jokes are gateways to the good ones. As Linus Pauling said: “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” Similarly, for every kickass joke, there are 1,000 bad ones.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams once wrote: “If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.” The price of success is failure.
By that logic, failure isn’t simply a silver-lining; it’s nearly a goal. Failure is a signal that you are trying hard. Failure is the indication that you are taking risks necessary to stay creative. Failure is the evidence that you haven’t given up.
The only way to conquer failure is to make it redundant. Take risks, try out new things, do experiments, and work towards much bigger failures. A particular project or a business venture may not work, but it shouldn’t stop you from trying newer things.
I was broke after my first business had failed. I needed some time to recover, but I hadn’t given up. I had quit that particular project, but I didn’t quit on trying new things. I geared up to work towards bigger failures. Since then, I’ve tried multiple things. Most of them haven’t worked, but some of them have.
This is a winning strategy for every creator. Amazon’s failures are small enough not to take the company down, and the company learns from each mistake in ways that amplifies both the frequency and magnitude of its future wins. Similarly, by the time you reach success, you would have made tonnes of failures, so many that they would have become insignificant in the face of success.
Interesting Finds
I.
All of us have dreams and hopes for our future. Some people dream of starting a family or living in another country, for instance. Other’s dreams are career focussed.
Our dreams form part of our identity, giving us purpose and direction, until reality gets in the way. Either our passion wanes with time or the obstacles to realising the dream becomes insurmountable.
Considering how our ambitions often become a core part of our sense of self, we find it unsettling to face the prospect of losing our dream. If we cannot achieve what we want to achieve, we will fail repeatedly if we don’t stop. So, it’s important to stop at some point.
Goal adjustment capacity becomes important here: the ability to disengage from fruitless goals and the ability to reengage in new, more productive goals. People who lack this capacity are inclined to bang their head against the wall when they’re confronted by an unobtainable goal. In the long term, they’re more prone to stress and chronic illness.
It’s a cliché to say that one door closing means another opening, but it’s true. By letting go of an impossible dream, you can free yourself to put time and effort into a potentially more rewarding project.
David Foster Wallace let go of his tennis-greatness dreams and became an acclaimed novelist and writer. Meanwhile, Roger Federer’s dreams of tennis greatness came true, but at the expense of his dream of becoming a professional footballer. Maryam Mirzakhani let go of her childhood dream of becoming a novelist but went on to be awarded the Fields Medal for mathematics in 2014—the first and only woman ever to receive the honour.
You might be agonising over whether you’re making a mistake, but there’s no good answer or formula for deciding whether to plough on or give up. It depends on the kind of person you are, and the kind of dream you are pursuing.
— How to Let Go of a Lifelong Dream
II.
Starting a successful startup makes you rich and famous, so a lot of the people trying to start startups are doing it for those reasons, instead of an earnest interest in the problem for its own sake.
A genuine interest in something is the most powerful motivator of all. But apart from being a source of strength, it’s also a source of vulnerability. Caring constrains you. The earnest can’t easily reply in kind to mocking banter, or put on a cool facade as if it doesn’t bother them. They care too much. They are doomed to be the straight man.
That’s a real disadvantage in your teenage years, when mocking banter and nihil admirari often have the upper hand. But it becomes an advantage later.
We have no difficulty believing that people would be interested in history or maths or even old bus tickets for their own sake. So why can’t there be people interested in self-driving cars or social networks for their own sake? When you look at the question from this side, it seems obvious there would be. And isn’t it likely that having a deep interest in something would be a source of great energy and resilience?
When founders are both formidable and earnest, they’re as close to unstoppable as you get.
III.
When we live life as an experiment, we are far more willing to take risks, to acknowledge failure, to learn and develop. That’s what experiments are all about: discovery and growth. There is no real failure in an experiment because it’s all data. If something doesn’t work, that’s simply data that leads to changing behaviour to see if something else does work.
When we’re experimenting, we’re willing to do all sorts of things we might be embarrassed to do otherwise. Like ask for something when we don’t particularly “deserve” it. Or say something in a conversation that might create a breakthrough (or might appear dumb). If it’s an experiment, then taking a risk is the win — whether it pans out or not.
And in those situations when it does pan out, we might just walk away with more than a good education.
Enrolled in the course. Superexcited for it. It's about time!