Run towards failure
How those at the top of their game use failure to accelerate their success
LeBron James holds the record for the most points scored by a player in NBA history; LeBron James also holds the record for the most shots missed by a player in NBA history.1
SpaceX repeatedly breaks records with its highly successful rocket launches every year; also, SpaceX’s first three rocket launches failed, leaving its founder Elon Musk on the brink of bankruptcy.2
Walt Disney was a pioneer of the animation industry; Walt Disney was also fired from his position as an illustrator for a newspaper, just three years before he moved to Hollywood and started his own studio.3
I never cease to be fascinated by the relationship that those in the upper echelons of success have with failure.
What interests me most about this is not just the fact that successful individuals have experienced some failure. It’s that the most successful people seem to have experienced some of the highest degrees of failure, often more than anyone else in the same arena.
Swinging and missing seems to be a very normal feature in the productive lives of highly successful people. Which would mean that they’re very comfortable with swinging, and they’re very okay with missing—perhaps more than anyone else in the same arena.
I’m often interested in studying the ‘success habits’ of those at the top of their game, but here’s what I submit: an equally interesting (and possibly underrated) well of insights can be found in the ‘failure habits’ of those at the top of their game.
Trying and failing provides more data than not trying at all
If you’ve watched interviews or read biographies of highly successful individuals, you might notice that most of them tend to speak of failure with a deep familiarity, as an active part of their productive life. More often than not, they attribute a good chunk of their success to their experiences with failure.
This isn’t just modesty in the face of fortune, at least not all of it. On the contrary, it makes perfect sense if you understand that they use failure as a data-gathering tool, to keep fine-tuning their output till they get it to a place they’re happy with.
This tendency to see failure as something useful—as an R&D mechanism towards getting something ‘more right’—probably explains why highly successful people tend to be so failure-forward.
For the person who cares deeply and passionately about building something great, information about what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong, and what they can do better would be worth its weight in gold. And often, the best way to get this information would be by doing test runs and launches and seeing what they learn from it.
To avoid failure at all cost would be to miss out on this data entirely, and consequently miss out on the high-leverage improvements (or wholesale recalibration) that would get you to where you want to go.
And that means sometimes, the cost of avoiding failure could actually be higher than the cost of failing and recalibrating.
Aim for more ‘okayness’ with failing
If the idea of being more failure-forward feels easier said than done, you’re not alone.
For many of us, failure feels embarrassing and crushing when we run into it, across most instances of what ‘swinging and missing’ looks like for us—whether that’s launching a product that doesn’t hit the mark yet, publishing an article or video that underperforms in audience reach (or gets something wrong, that is publicly pointed out to us), pitching to a potential investor and getting rejected, or sending out a cold-email that doesn’t get a response.
It’s easier in those moments to feel like not getting the outcome you hoped for is a final judgment of what you’re capable of in that arena. The default approach is usually to see failure as the end point of some goal-pursuit, in a way that is static and final (“oh well, you tried, and it turns out you suck, the end”).
The infinitely more useful approach is to see failure as the midpoint of some important goal-pursuit—as a data-gathering and strategy-recalibrating pitstop in a dynamic, ongoing process.
And perhaps the best way of making it easier to adopt this second approach, is to regard instances of failure as something normal, and stripped of shame or negative self-indictment.
This normalisation of failure—as an obvious feature of trying new things—is possibly my favourite through-line across the operating modes of highly successful individuals.
Like Elon Musk’s declaration for SpaceX and Tesla that “failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”4
And Spanx founder Sarah Blakely’s childhood anecdote of sitting at the dinner table with her father, who would ask each of his kids what they failed at that week—and be disappointed when they didn’t fail at anything—because failing meant that they tried to do something new (unsurprisingly, Blakely credits much of her success to this attitude modelled by her father).5
And inventor James Dyson’s suggestion to “enjoy failure” with the curiosity of an explorer: “If you are exploring new territory, or experimenting, or trying to do something different, you’re going to fail many times, and you’ve got to bounce back from it. [...] Failure is so much more interesting than success, because you question it: well, why did it go wrong? And actually, the reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting.”6
If getting this comfortable with failing seems near impossible at first, try thinking of it as a sliding scale that you can adjust at any given point of time.
Consider what it would look like for you to be a little more okay with failing, a little less embarrassed about it when it happens, and a little more curious and proactive in gathering the data around some instance of failure, so you can do better next time.
Chances are, you will do a bit better next time, and the time after that—and the momentary heat of failure wouldn’t matter as much when you’re on the other side of improvement.
https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/lebron-james-breaks-kobe-bryants-record-for-most-missed-shots-in-nba-history/
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex-nearly-failed-itself-out-of-existence.html | https://www.space.com/space-exploration/private-spaceflight/spacex-shatters-its-rocket-launch-record-yet-again-167-orbital-flights-in-2025
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesasquith/2020/12/29/did-you-know-walt-disney-was-rejected-300-times-for-mickey-mouse-and-his-theme-park/
https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/elon-musk-fired-paypay-founded-tesla-spacex
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/03/self-made-billionaire-spanx-founder-sara-blakely-sold-fax-machines-before-making-it-big.html
This substack of yours never fails to impress me (see what I did here).
Failure is a phenomenal teacher if you let it.