You Must Fail if You Don’t Want to FAIL
Somewhere along the way we forget that failing is OK. We attach a negative association with failure and stop looking at it as a building block or a lesson. We only see it is a final result and lose perspective on the overall success of our ideas. The lost perspective is that failure acknowledges a flaw and gives you the opportunity to correct that flaw. If you’ve given yourself no room to correct it or have simply not allowed yourself to have any flaws… then you can never succeed.
You stumbled, tripped, fell and crashed before you ever walked.
You grunted, squawked, blurted and mumbled before you ever talked.
Failure should be seen as the pursuit of greatness. Mistakes and missteps are only bad if you’re not learning from them.
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” -Michael Jordan
Software is Hard on Failures… Websites Thrive on Them.
Websites are not software. With a software application you need to have it working really well with very few bugs, because once you ship it out to the world… it’s very hard to correct your mistakes. Bothering users of your software to constantly be installing updated versions is a nuisance and will most likely kill your product.
With a website you can update at any time. Weekly, Hourly… Daily if you want. As long as you’re responding quickly to the bugs and improve your service with each fix, you’re making a better product… By leveraging your user base to help you constantly improve you’ll be able to develop the best solution much quicker than any competitor who is still trying to guess it perfectly right before they launch.
The web is an international, extremely fast evolving organism. While somebody spent months planning and raising capital to build a project that would help rank stories online… some guy spent a few hundred bucks building an idea and now that project needs to compete against Digg. Somebody else was still revising and editing their thoughts about a micro-blogging service and in the mean time a couple of guys throw together a simple status updating service and now Twitter has changed the whole industry they were trying to work in.
You don’t need things to be perfect. All they need to be is GEFN:
GEFN- Good Enough For Now
Does it meet the basic needs and requirements?
Does it add value?
Does it allow for improvements?
Are you ready to respond immediately to feedback?
… then it’s good enough for now. Share it. Launch it. Let the world knock it around, test it out and give you feedback.
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” -Bobby Kennedy
As a perfect example of GEFN, my thoughts on “success on the web requires failure” aren’t perfect yet… But I wanted to share the idea with you. You can help me make this idea more perfect by giving me feedback, helping me see the flaws in my logic and suggesting improvements.
Thanks for helping me fail one more time at writing the perfect post.
-Darius
Travis said,
January 5, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Love the GEFN acronym.
I think there’s a huge difference between failing, and being a failure. The first is part of the process of business and life. The latter is an individual that takes the hiccups in that process personally.
I can’t count the amount of times I’ve failed at something. Wish I had spent more time attempting new things in my younger years. Incredible feeling when you finally get it right.
Aaron Irizarry said,
January 6, 2009 at 10:07 am
Hey Great Read. I just rote something similar over at my blog.
http://www.thisisaaronslife.com/8-ways-we-fail-at-failing/
The lessons learned from failing are often the most valuable, and the most helpful
John said,
January 7, 2009 at 2:41 am
Great article as usual, good to see some new content going back up on here - was almost going to unsubscribe cause I thought you’d given up on it!
Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for January 07 » Silicon Florist said,
January 8, 2009 at 1:04 am
[...] You Must Fail if You Don’t Want to FAIL | Internet Astronauts Darius Monsef writes “Somewhere along the way we forget that failing is OK. We attach a negative association with failure and stop looking at it as a building block or a lesson. We only see it is a final result and lose perspective on the overall success of our ideas. The lost perspective is that failure acknowledges a flaw and gives you the opportunity to correct that flaw. If you’ve given yourself no room to correct it or have simply not allowed yourself to have any flaws… then you can never succeed.” [...]
Darius Monsef said,
January 8, 2009 at 10:02 am
@Travis
Very true about the difference between a failure and being one… and I look forward to this great incredible feeling you speak of
@Aaron
Your list is a great partner to my thoughts above… gives some great specific ways to look at your mistakes.
@John
Haven’t given up… was just failing silently at putting my thoughts down in post form. This post was actually a personal great lesson… I often don’t post because I haven’t fully flushed out my thoughts and worry about posting incomplete ideas… but I gave myself permission for the idea to be unpolished and to go ahead and fail a little and learn along the way.
Aaron Irizarry said,
January 8, 2009 at 3:01 pm
@Darius - Thank you for your kind words.
Allowing yourself the permission to fail, or not “be perfect” is key.
Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for January 07 : Oregon Startup Blog said,
January 8, 2009 at 11:42 pm
[...] You Must Fail if You Don’t Want to FAIL | Internet Astronauts Darius Monsef writes “Somewhere along the way we forget that failing is OK. We attach a negative association with failure and stop looking at it as a building block or a lesson. We only see it is a final result and lose perspective on the overall success of our ideas. The lost perspective is that failure acknowledges a flaw and gives you the opportunity to correct that flaw. If you’ve given yourself no room to correct it or have simply not allowed yourself to have any flaws… then you can never succeed.” [...]
How to learn Programming | Master Fidgeter said,
February 15, 2009 at 2:36 am
[...] One thing that always needs to be in the back of the mind when learning is this: Somewhere along the way we forget that failing is OK. We attach a negative association with failure and stop looking at it as a building block or a lesson. We only see it is a final result and lose perspective on the overall success of our ideas. —Darius Monsef, Internet Astronauts [...]
RaiulBaztepo said,
March 28, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo