If you want to truly succeed in life, then you have to fail first—a lot. The more, the better. If that sounds counterintuitive, it’s because you’re not looking at failure with the right perspective. You’ve been told all your life to learn from your mistakes in order to avoid them, but have you ever considered that you should be making those mistakes on purpose?

If you can’t wrap your head around that bombshell, don’t worry—by the time we’re done with this, you’ll have an entirely different outlook on the relationship between failure and success. So let’s get started!

Speaking of inspiration, how do we get good ideas? A lot of people think ideas are these big moments of realization, like the world fell silent and light from the heavens came down, putting the spotlight on you, or like a giant light bulb appearing out of thin air with a little ding.

But life is not an animated cartoon, right? Ideas don’t just pop into your head like that, even if it might kind of feel that way. That’s the point American author Stephen Johnson made in a 2010 TED Talk. He argued that ideas are not these eureka moments.

You probably have a memory of standing under the shower when suddenly everything finally clicked. But can you really say that your idea just materialized out of nowhere? Mr. Johnson would disagree.

Ideas as Networks of Events

You see, ideas are not isolated events, and that’s a good thing because we can’t all take a shower every time we need to have an idea. Ideas are networks of events; they are a combination of your knowledge and life experiences. That moment of epiphany? It’s just the final drop of water in a filled cup—you just didn’t know you were filling it this whole time.

Take the invention of the GPS, for example. During the TED Talk, Johnson shared the amusing story of how it came to be. Back in early October of 1957, the Sputnik had just launched, and the scientific community was going nuts about it. As the news broke around the country, two young researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, William Geyer and George Vivenbach, wondered if they could listen to the satellite as it orbited.

This wasn’t some grand experiment; it was mostly just curiosity. So they did! Geyer went with Vivenbach to his office, and they started playing around until they managed to tune in to the signal the satellite emitted. This quickly evolved into them mapping out the position of the satellite with just some beeps.

A few weeks later, their boss came in and asked them if they could reverse the process. Instead of figuring out the position of the satellite from the ground, could they use the satellite to find a position on the ground? And so, the GPS was born. But we wouldn’t know that until years later. They didn’t set out to change the world; they were practically goofing around at first, just experimenting to see if something was possible.

Failure & Innovation

The Invention of the Wheel

Nobody predicted that the wheel—one of the greatest inventions in human history—would emerge in Mesopotamia circa 4200 BC. It changed the game entirely. Can you imagine life before the wheel? Ugh, that’s rough! Did you think that people just sat around waiting for ideas to come? Hell no! Ain’t nobody got time for that.

They worked hard, carrying rocks and logs until eventually, someone came along with the wheel. But that person probably didn’t wake up one day and just make a wheel. That’s not how it works. Most likely, it came through a process of experimentation. They were trying to make the process of moving things around more efficient. For all we know, they tested out multiple ideas. Maybe in a parallel reality, we got stuck with square wheels.

Would you say that they failed to invent the wheel because their previous ideas didn’t work? No! It’s those ideas that led them to their invention. You can’t sit around waiting for an idea. All you’re going to do is rack up your water bill with long showers.

Redefining Failure

You need to go out there and fail repeatedly. But to do that, you first need to change your idea of failure. When people think of failure, they imagine catastrophe, suffering, and tears. We have a very black-and-white approach to failure and success, but that’s not how it works.

So the first step to using your failures to your advantage is changing your mindset about them. It’s like American author Zig Ziglar said: “Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.”

It’s like playing a game—you’re not supposed to give up on your first try. How many times have you won a game in a single try? When you die or lose, you just go right back to playing, right? You try something different, maybe a new strategy.

You need to redefine failure as experimentation. Success hardly ever happens in a vacuum or off a single moment. You must fail, try again, fail again, and so on. The more you try, the better your chances of succeeding become. Failure isn’t some terrible outcome; it’s just a natural part of the process.

The Only Real Failure

The only real failure comes when you stop trying or when you just can’t continue playing the game. That’s critical failure because when you put down the game, that’s when you lose. True game over. But if you keep trying, eventually you’ll come up with a new angle or idea that cracks the whole thing wide open—that eureka moment.

It’s standing in the back of all your previous attempts. To quote the founder and CEO of Creon Systems, Aprove Doobie:

“The only thing that separates success from failure is one last attempt.”

Try one more time, and you’ll get lucky. That’s all there is. You try something, and if it doesn’t work, you pivot and try something else.

Sharing Failures

As you do this, you accumulate experiences and knowledge, and that idea will slowly start to take form until finally, it takes shape—and eureka! That’s why you should aim to fail or experiment as quickly and as early as possible. The more you do it now, the sooner you’ll get to where you want to be.

But to really make the most out of failure, you have to share it. Taking failure to the next level, adaptation is the true key to long-term success. You only learn to adapt when you’re forced to think about other possibilities and see other angles.

There’s an acronym that really nails down what we’re trying to say here: Frequent Adaptation Inspires Learning (FAIL). If you’re the type to just move on after winning, then you’re not really learning much from the experience, are you?

Learning from Failure

The truly successful people challenge themselves to change the standards of their industries and find ways to improve the world or introduce new perspectives. For entrepreneurs like Jordan O’Neill and Jonathan Williams, co-founders of Failure Lab, each failure is a lesson. Their event encourages people to share their experiences with failure, be it personal or professional, so you can learn from it.

There’s a lot of value in pooling together your failures with those on your team. That’s something the famous YouTuber Mr. Beast once mentioned as a mistake YouTubers commonly make—not sharing their failures. Think about it: if you have three friends and you all made an experiment and failed 100 times, that’s 300 experiments—that’s a lot of data to learn from. However, when you go it alone, you only have your own experiences to draw from.

Successful Innovators

Succeeding requires a lot of failure. You need to try again and again. People make the mistake of looking at the rich and powerful and focusing on a single moment of their success, but they forget about how they got there. Let me give you a hint: most of them failed a lot.

Think about Thomas Edison and the invention of the light bulb. As an inventor, Edison tried hundreds of different approaches and materials for his version of the light bulb. He didn’t see those unsuccessful attempts as failures but merely as materials that didn’t work. He continued testing until he made a version that finally broke through. When asked by a reporter how it felt to fail 1,000 times, he replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times; the light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

Michael Jordan had a similar philosophy. He famously said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions, I’ve been entrusted to make the game-winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”

As you can see, failure is a stepping stone to success. You should not avoid it.

Make failure a goal.

Go out there and Fail as fast as possible.

The next time you hit a wall, remember: failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s a crucial part of it.

Cheers,

Jonas