How to Fail Easily

Posted May 05, 2008 in Starting It, Innovation, 1 Comment »

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  1. Without embracing failure, you'll keep yourself stagnant.
  2. Failure speeds up learning.
  3. Failure accelerates successful innovations.

But, how do you encourage failure?

Peep this.

The Warcraft Mindset

Why do peeps love playing games?

  • Because if you fail, you barely lose anything.
  • It's so ridiculously-easy to try again.

Likewise, with your innovations:

  1. Make every failure ghetto-cheap.
  2. Make it ridiculously-easy to retry-retry.

How?

You have $1000.

You want to successfully deploy a Product ABC to Customer Segment XYZ.

Scenario A

  1. You spend $1000 on Strategy A.
  2. Strategy A fails.
  3. You fail.

Scenario B

  1. You spend $100 on Strategy A.
  2. Strategy A fails.
  3. You just learned (1) what didn't work, (2) a clearer picture of what might work -- and oh, you still have $900 to try various different strategies.

Scenario B = Rock.

By giving yourself a fatter-more-obese safety-net when you fail, you make every failure insignificant.

"But, what if I need lots of $$$?!"

If you said that to our amigo Supertreezy, he would:

  1. slap you

Startups spend fractions of what the multi-billion-dollar behemoths spend, and can still succeed.

How do they save $$$?

  1. By getting creative with their money.
  2. By cutting costs wherever @#$% possible (e.g. using eBay, using open-source, buying basic, buying generic, etc.)
  3. By getting experienced talent/mentors to speed up learning/pace.
  4. By exploiting technology to the fullest extent -- as necessary.
  5. By being the ghettoest-of-ghetto in every possible way.

When you do that, failure becomes:

  1. cheap
  2. so-much-farkingly-easier to bounce back from

You'll soon see yourself failing forward, quickly and easily -- accelerating your successful innovations.

To create a culture where failure becomes ain't-no-thang-but-a-chicken-wing-on-a-string:

Make failure cheap.

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More Business Tips You Might Enjoy

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  2. Why Motivational Posters Suck
  3. What Separates Google From Other Companies?
  4. How To Not Suck As A Boss
  5. Why You Shouldn't Hire Superstars

1 Comment on How to Fail Easily

Dave Navarro

Posted @ 11:11 AM on May 05, 2008

I love that long list of options from Supertreezy: "slap you."

Indeed ...


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