Again, Failure – Not Always a Good Thing

Posted: May 18th, 2010 | Author: Laura Rich | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The idea that failure is a badge of honor will likely never go away – in the area of romance, Tennyson had a nice way of putting it – but science says it’s not always a good thing.

I wrote earlier about how failing at a startup is a turn-off to investors like my pal Mark, and to managers like me. We’d rather see how someone faced down a failure-inducing challenge and turned it around.

Some folks at MIT and Harvard agree. I think I mentioned their study before, but it has been making the rounds again, and I ran across it on my pal Caroline Waxler’s site LearnVest, which found it on Entrepreneur.com, and it looks like the whole thing was picked up by Business Insider.

This is a good thing.

A key point in these pieces is this: Don’t set out to fail. The brain learns better from success.

I can relate to this very deeply as someone who has twice now started businesses and onto a third (and maybe a fourth). Things don’t always work out (one did, one didn’t-ish). But they don’t get to success without a whole lot of faith and a sharp eye on the prize. The main startup I’m working on now has a lot of risks involved, from the customer angles to the tech and funding angles. It would be easy enough to stomach the risks with a dose of rationalization that, hey, at least it will be a learning experience.

But that would be a load of crap. You gotta set out to succeed. More importantly, frankly, you gotta succeed. The study says our brains only learn from success, not failure. And really, think about it: What’s an entrepreneur without a company under his/her belt? I hear a tree falling in a forest…

–

“roadkill” image via estherase under Creative Commons license

---