Is Failure the Key to Success?

There's a recent bestseller called Fail Fast, Fail Often: How Losing Can Help You Win that is very popular in Silicon Valley lately.

Part of the idea is to give yourself permission to fail. So many people with good ideas never get started or take risks because they’re afraid of failing or being embarrassed. 

According to Pixar founder Ed Catmull in his book Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Director Andrew Stanton (Nemo) urges his staff to "fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.” Working through problems makes sense in the animation business because the costs mount quickly as an idea moves through the pipeline.

Neil Gaiman says: “Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before.”

The BBC reported about a design college that divided a class into two groups, one that was told they would be graded on the quantity of what they produced, and another that was told they would be graded on quality. The quantity group produced not only more work, but more quality work. The quality group was stuck in the envisioning stage.

At Google, the mantra in their skunkworks is a little different. It's "Build fast, break stuff." They create lots of new ideas, and as a strong one emerges, they develop it, but they also actively try to kill it. If an idea survives that process, they keep going with it. 

As for me, I think it's important to allow a space for failure, but I think a person or an organization only wins by focusing on winning. I'm personally doubtful about the "fail fast, fail often" mantra. It definitely doesn't apply to enterprises where failures can be catastrophic, such as auto racing, aeronautics, or space travel.

But even in the relatively low-risk arena of picture making, I think focusing on failure as a goal is not terribly helpful. 

There's an interesting MIT study that looks at what goes on in the brains of monkeys when they're learning. It turns out that "brain cells may only learn from experience when we do something right and not when we fail." The study leader says: "We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not." Author Deborah Halber continues, "When a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain - nor was there any improvement in behavior." 

The way I would describe my mindset is: Visualize the goal and start out with a playful, experimental attitude. Keep a low enough investment in any preliminary idea to allow yourself to let it go if it’s not working so you can find a better idea. Many ideas that turn out to be successful start off looking weak and unlikely at first. 

Once you’ve got a good idea and you’ve tested it and thought through all the ways it could go wrong, then the mindset has to change. Carrying a big idea to its conclusion requires a dogged, long-term commitment. Don’t let anything stop you until the final result is as good as it can be. 

Unsuccessful efforts are not failures. They’re only a real failure if you don’t learn anything from them. Each trial generates a nugget of value, even if it turns out to be off track. The successful final result, which may look to someone from the outside like a stroke of genius, is just the harvesting of little successes plucked from the abandoned prototypes developed along the way.

To boil that down: “Generate lots of ideas, test them, and then build on what works, always with an eye toward success.”

Read more
BBC: "How Creativity is Helped by Failure"
MIT Study: Why we learn more from our successes than our failures
The Verge: The Good Dinosaur is looking like Pixar's first box-office failure

Thanks to blog reader Paul Foxton and to Frank and Dan Gurney (all three of you).