In REWORK, the authors Jason and David talk about how learning from failure in business is overrated. They cite a New York Times article about how venture-backed companies led by a winning entrepreneur are more likely to succeed.
Already-successful entrepreneurs were far more likely to succeed again: their success rate for later venture-backed companies was 34 percent. But entrepreneurs whose companies had been liquidated or gone bankrupt had almost the same follow-on success rate as the first-timers: 23 percent.
Failing can teach you an important lesson when you’re running a business, but success is a better teacher (and not to mention more fun). Failing teaches you only what not to do, what to avoid. If you study your successes and come across the same situation, you’ll know exactly what to do.
“Fail early and fail often” is a phrase I often hear repeated and one I’ve come to dislike. Failing causes pain and the human condition is to avoid pain in the future. When you burn your hand, you learn not to touch the hot fire. You don’t start out building the fire by saying “okay, I’m going to touch the hot fire so I learn what not to do in the future.” You do your best to avoid the fire altogether.
Failing is different than making mistakes. No business journey will be mistake-free. You learn from your mistakes and constantly readjust. I don’t consider those little errors failures.
When I run a business, I keep my eye on the prize (profitability). If I worried about the odds against me or every possible reason I could fail, I’d never get anything done.
I, too, find it curious (and unfortunate) that learning from one’s mistakes shifted from being the way to make the best of a bad situation to being a goal in and of itself. Perhaps a better analogy than burning oneself in a fire is a biological organism. An organism is similar to a copmany or venture it that it is subject to many environmental variables, events, and collaborators. Both usually fail because of a series of factors or decisions rather than one traumatic event (e.g. decapitation/loss of founder or president). And post mortem examinations, while helpful for determining why something or somebody died, are only possible because it or they died.