As someone once famously said, “Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be.” Parts of my book, Celebrating Failure: The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes and Thinking Big, are being questioned with the release of the outstanding book titled Rework by authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. We are kindred revolutionary spirits on nearly every point, save the value of failure.
The authors write, “Learning from mistakes is overrated.” They then use a mildly edgy approach to make their case. “If other people can’t market their product, it has nothing to do with you.” Well who could argue with that? Except you can go to school inexpensively on other people’s inability to market themselves when you analyze the approach they used and learn from how they failed.
While there is benefit to analyzing other people’s failures, the bigger benefit comes from using your own attempts at success to take your own big idea to a higher level through a process of continuous improvement. Most often when people miss the mark and fail they are only a tweak away from success. Yet because they are often embarrassed by their failure, when they should be proud they had the guts to try, they walk away in defeat.
Then my fellow authors concede, “You might learn what not to do again, but how valuable is that?” It is extremely valuable if you celebrate it as the first step toward success and use it as insight as to what will eventually work. But that only happens when you are listening and improving upon your first attempt.
My leadership soul mates then make the case that success is more valuable than failure when they say, “Success gives you real ammunition.” Absolutely. Success is far more valuable than failure, but you still need to apply continuous improvement to whatever you achieved or someone else will come along, improve upon it, and do it better, faster and cheaper.
It can be challenging to take your new success and real ammunition and replicate it across other disciplines. How many times have we seen a business strike gold in one area and naively believe that unique idea can be easily transferred to another business? But, alas, most successes were unique and are not easily replicated or transferable, but they are certainly a great point from which to start.
And to my rescue comes acclaimed book reviewer Robert Morris, “In Celebrating Failure: The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes, and Thinking Big, Ralph Heath explains how the power of taking bold but carefully calculated risks and making mistakes while pursuing what Jim Collins characterizes as BHAGs (i.e. Big Hairy Audacious Goals), can achieve success of a magnitude and value that would otherwise be impossible. Heath really does not advocate celebrating failure per se; rather, he advocates celebrating the process by which to leverage failure as a means by which to succeed.”
I couldn’t have said it better. Rework is an outstanding book that I would highly recommend. In fact, what I admire most about Rework is the title. It would have worked well as the title for Celebrating Failure.