It’s not that I’m trying to ‘apologize’ for the past (and future?) failures of mine, nor I’m trying to, let’s say, sweeten the pill to those that won’t make it to the Openfund, or anything related to that. It’s just that what I’m seeing around me, especially in my small country, is a default approach to the penalization of the most effective of learning processes, failure that is.
As I consider this erroneous and a fundamental reason to both risk and creativity aversion, let me share with you again here this recent tweet of mine, which attempts to summarize my weak experience in life and business so far:
‘You learn when you fail.
You fail when you don’t learn.
Thus, you need to fail, at first.
Yes, the relationship between learning and failure is causal, so both are prerequisites to success; penalizing the first or the latter cannot lead to desirable results. But, please do not consider anything of the above as a general truth, after all general is contradictory to social and our very nature. Also, it goes without saying that I’m not suggesting you to deliberately fail in your first attempts, or I’m underestimating the charisma of learning via doing the right things, either we’re talking start-ups, or anything else after all.
I’m just providing the context in which I believe we should interpret failures, either our own ones, or the ones around us: Given that you take your lessons seriously, a failure is the biggest step you make towards your success that follows.