Thursday, September 30, 2010

Fail Early, Fail Often

As I read "Making Things Happen" by Scott Belsky, I found out that Seth Godin, a prolific author who creates many products, attributes his success to the fact that he "ships". He doesn't wait around to see if an idea is perfect or not, he executes the idea and ships it out to see the results.

The fact is, he fails much more often than he succeeds.

I'm reminded in this lesson of many of us who have a fear of success. There are many things around the fear of success that are intangible.

Could that fear really be fear of failure?

In order to find success, we must risk the possibility of failure. A baseball player fails 70% of the time. A great basketball player misses 50% of his/her three pointers. Seth Godin claims that his failures far outweigh his successes.

What if we approached success with the full knowledge that failure is imminent? What if we looked at failure as inevitable, even desirable. Knowing the percentages, we will encounter success only with a good dose of failure mixed in.

And we can let go of our attachment to our perfection so that failure loses its emotional charge as a bad thing. If failure is actually a badge of honor and a positive attribute that opens the door to success, will we be more likely to embrace opportunities that might result in failure?

It is this change of perspective that will free me from paralysis by analysis. It is the new paradigm of "failure is my friend" that will create the opportunities for my full potential of success.

Comment, follow me.
Peace,
Larry

2 comments:

Michelle said...

Interesting! I'll remember this one!

Dave W said...

Babe Ruth held the record for both home runs and strikeouts for many years. "Every strike brings me closer to the next home run" he said.