⇥ The importance of failure
Failure is not just a great way to learn to avoid mistakes. Sometimes, it’s just a way to learn about failure.There are some industries where failure—to parahrase Gene Kranz—is simply not an option. This, however, doesn’t mean that failure doesn’t occur… just that it needs to be expected and dealt with before it actually undermines the objectives of a specific task.
Failure is, of course, an excellent teaching tool—one that, unfortunately, is no longer much in fashion in our schools, much to my personal chagrin. If we don’t allow our children to fail, we also do not allow them to learn to cope with something that they will, at some point, inevitably come to face in life. Worse, we do not teach them to analyze their action to recognize the potential for failure before it occurs.
This is something that is important even in the most mundane of life activities. People who are unable to plan for failure fall into all sorts of traps—from sticking a fork in a toaster to accumulating so much credit card debt that their lives are financially ruined. Risk management is not something that banks and software developers do—it’s a useful tool in everyone’s life arsenal.
I have experienced lots of failures in my life—some of them rather spectacular. Failure has, of course, taught me a lot of things: first, to prioritize the things that matter, and second to know that the trick to playing chicken is knowing when to flinch.
There is, however, an even more important lesson that I have learned about failure: that sometimes, failure is inevitable—or, as the colloquial expression goes, shit happens. Knowing that, sooner or later, things are going to fail is an important, almost cathartic realization that keeps the unwary apart from the wise.
This is a point that I don’t often hear made when people talk about failure; the moral behind a failure-related story is usually about preventing it, or dealing with the aftermath, but not about the fact that sometimes things go bad despite your best efforts, and all the careful risk management and contingency planning won’t keep you from going down in flames. This is important, because it forces every person to establish a risk threshold that they are willing to accept in every one of their life efforts.
For example, my family-related and law-related thresholds are exactly zero. That’s why my family comes before anything else, and why I always try to measure the risks I take very carefully—and keep a backup plan firmly in my pocket (a corollary of this is that I don’t break the law—ever. One of the things that I learned early on in business is that no amount of money is worth going to jail for, so I don’t steal, or cheat on my taxes—and I’ve got the government audits to prove it).
If you’re wondering what I’m blabbering about, check out this video of a keynote that Mythbusters’ Adam Savage gave at the Maker Faire. It’s exactly what I am talking about: no lesson, no moral, just things going wrong despite Adam’s best intentions. It’s one of the most inspirational presentations that I’ve seen in ages—and it comes from someone whose motto is “failure is always an option!”
Comments
Excellent post. I agree that we do not have a healthy outlook on failure as a society anymore. As a young person, when we have less responsibility and fewer people depending on us, we are not allowed to fall on our face enough. And this makes us more fearful of failure as we get older.
Respect the risks that exist, but do not let failure slow you down.
Michelangelo tried to destroy all of his sketches for his most famous works (David, etc.) because he didn't want people to think he had to work toward an eventual success. Even in ages past, success went hand-in-hand with divine providence, not man-made, hard-earned work.
Today, when we don't include failure as a natural element of the learning / growth cycle, we promote an alternate reality: that all successes happened because they were *supposed* to. (Either that, or all successful people are geniuses.)
And since success really *is* such hard work, should we be surprised that the world's finest aren't so eager to leave behind a trail of failure-flavored breadcrumbs?
It's ironic that the second part of the post undoes all the good that was done in the first part. Risks are involved in anything you do. They might be estimated and reduced, but can not be eliminated but eliminating the risky activity itself, or aiming for as low as possible. So if your family related risk tolerance is 0, you should not have a family, since there is no amount of planning, effort or commitment that can eliminate risk altogether. The second part of the post perpetuates the illusion that you can plan for success at least in matters of family and law abiding behavior, whereas business and craft belong to the realm of intrinsically risky activities. But the powerful message of the first part is that determinism is an illusion, no matter what the domain. That message should be not diluted carving exceptions to it. See also "The new alliance" by Prigogine and Stengers.
Since we agree on the first part of the post, let's focus on the second—which, you know, follows from the first.
The whole point of the post is the concept that (as you also note), risk management is no longer a deterministic affair—you don't plan for absolute success, but for the best possible resolution. Therefore, it's implicit that you cannot control everything.
At the same time, risk doesn't happen in isolation—usually, there is a group of concurrent, interrelated and antagonistic risks: a zero-tolerance risk for family doesn't mean that I expect absolute success in that area; it's possible that tomorrow I will die of a heart attack, orphaning my children and widowing my wife. Or, my wife could get run over by a car. There is nothing I can reasonably do to prevent these things, so these are not true risks.
Once you accept that "risk" cannot be eliminated, "zero tolerance" means simply that you choose not to intentionally create any sort of risks in a specific category and that, when presented with a choice (for example, do I take the high-paying job in China if the family doesn't like it?) you use risk tolerance as a means to classify your actions (that is, "no").