Failure’s False Lesson

Failure has become a fascinating topic – mythologized in startup media as well as the culture at large. It’s written about as if it’s a prerequisite for success – like hard work or ingenuity.   And while I can appreciate the Buddhist underpinnings of embracing failure, it feels like we’ve lost the signal from the noise. 

Failure is as natural as the earth and the sun. An interminable pull much like gravity that exacts itself on businesses. When we try to organize activity (business or any other type), we’re pushing back against failure’s gravitational force. A force that seems to prefer chaos to cohesion. 

Maybe that’s why it has become fashionable to celebrate failure as a rite of passage – we’re finally acknowledging the natural order and failure’s place in it. Insights turned tropes like “fail early, fail often” and “you learn more from failure than you do from success” have become ingrained in business speak/culture in the social media age.  

It’s understandable, given that we’re surrounded by so much noise (see social media), that mining our own experiences, in this case, a recent failure can feel very tangible and definitive but that doesn’t mean it’s conclusive. When a business fails, it’s likely due to a number of factors and pinpointing the determinant is harder than it looks. We spend time reflecting and creating a narrative around “why” – maybe we get it right, maybe we don’t. These insights hint at the possibility of attaining precision but I’m dubious. In the process, we’ll attempt to define (or re-define) failure so we can frame our shortcomings as a part of the hero’s journey. The painful truth is we only have certainty that we failed.  

So what, if anything, is to be gained from failing?

I’m skeptical that we can truly know why something failed and more importantly, on whether those “lessons” can be translated and applied going forward – especially given how fast business context changes. We have access to literally 1000s of podcasts, blogs, videos, books, tweets that can be mined for strategic and tactical insights. While there are some variations, you see many of the same lessons (good and bad) in that deluge of content. The stories outside of the general patterns tend to have tactical or strategic missteps unique to their specific environment. Again, confirming that the insights gathered from your circumstances may not be applicable going forward. The specific lessons are too narrow and the broader ones are not insightful.  

But that said, failure does have value on a personal level for some. We’d all like to think we’re tough but we don’t really know until we experience the hard thing. There’s a lot of discussion about resilience – how to learn it or teach it to children but I’d argue resilience (or toughness) can’t be learned. You can only exhibit it when tested. Failure can’t help us with strategy and tactics (plenty of better ways to learn) but it can validate our perseverance. So maybe the best we can do is use setbacks as a way to prove to ourselves (and others) that we are resilient. We can feel the sting and keep pushing forward.