How to Fail Easily
- Without embracing failure, you'll keep yourself stagnant.
- Failure speeds up learning.
- 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:
- Make every failure ghetto-cheap.
- 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
- You spend $1000 on Strategy A.
- Strategy A fails.
- You fail.
Scenario B
- You spend $100 on Strategy A.
- Strategy A fails.
- 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 $$$?!"
If you said that to our amigo Supertreezy, he would:
- slap you
Startups spend fractions of what the multi-billion-dollar behemoths spend, and can still succeed.
How do they save $$$?
- By getting creative with their money.
- By cutting costs wherever @^^% possible (e.g. using eBay, using open-source, buying basic, buying generic, etc.)
- By getting experienced talent/mentors to speed up learning/pace.
- By exploiting technology to the fullest extent -- as necessary.
- By being the ghettoest-of-ghetto in every possible way.
When you do that, failure becomes:
- cheap
- 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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Posted on May 05