The word "failure" – it's a bad word. There are many cultures where failure is considered *so* bad that basically someone who fails that may change their whole life. If you are in a company and you do something and it fails, you may never recover; or if you do something that fails, you do something bad, you can never recover – and that's *wrong*!
There's the company IDEO, a design company in California. It has this philosophy about fail fast, fail frequently. They're trying to say failure is a good thing because failure is how you learn. But the word "failure" is a negative. I remember I was in Korea and I was talking to some students, and one student who I became friends with was telling me how
he wasn't doing well, et cetera, et cetera, and... But I tried to learn what he had worked on. And it turned out that he had once designed a golf bag – a bag that held golf clubs. And it won a prize. And then a company said, "We really like that." And the company started manufacturing it. And I said, "I don't understand. It sounded to me like that was a great success; why are you so unhappy?"
Well, because the product *didn't sell well*. And so, eventually it was removed from the market; so, he considers it a failure. And I said, "Wait a minute. You succeeded. You did this brilliant thing as a *student*. And this company came and just looked at it and said, 'That's wonderful!' and they manufactured it, and it didn't sell well. That's the company's fault, not your fault." But, no, to him it was a life-defining moment and he really never recovered.
"Failure" – that word; horrible. I have friends who have just the opposite view. If you don't fail at things, you're *not trying hard enough*. How do I know you're trying something that's new and innovative and different that will change the world? Well, it means that because occasionally it didn't make it – it failed – because if you're not failing, you're not trying. You're not trying the extremes; you're not trying outrageous ideas which often are the most positive ones.
So, failure ought to be a great thing; so, I think that IDEO shouldn't say fail fast, fail frequently. I think they should say, "Learn fast, learn frequently." And I like to say that scientists *never* fail. And here's why: because I'm studying this important phenomenon, and so I spend a year or even two years trying to study it and doing this and studying that; in the end, I say, "That's not working.
I think I'm going to try something different." They don't say, "I failed; I'm a failure." They say, "That didn't work." because they learned a lot along the way, they never got to their goal, but they don't count that as a failure. And that's how we should all be. But even when you've had a really unhappy case, even when you really did fail, you should realize that that's OK. *We all fail.* And we should learn from it and go on to the next thing and the next thing. And the more failures we have, actually, the better we're going to be in the future
because we've learned so much. And remember, you only fail when you *push the envelope*. And it's pushing, pushing, pushing – the extreme – that eventually leads to great rewards because if you want to be innovative, you have to be failing, if you will, or maybe learning, *all the time*. In Silicon Valley, there are many startup companies.
And oftentimes people start a company for the first time and don't make it. Ninety percent of the companies that start fail. In fact, it's a higher percentage when you learn that a lot of them don't even get started *enough* that you counted them as a start. So, most of them don't make it. And you know what might people who – the people who support these early startups say? "Yeah, we see these promising people starting something, and we'll get them money to do it,
but we expect they're not going to make it." But when they come back the *second time* and say, 'Oh, we have some new ideas,' we say, 'You failed the first time; good. You've learned a lot, haven't you? You're more likely to succeed now because you've had that experience. You know the sort of things you have to think about.'" You just watch extreme sports. Watch these people on skateboards doing flips, doing this, that and the other. Or watch skiers, and it looks wonderful, right? Any gymnast, any athlete.
But, actually, they have spent thousands of hours refining that and they often fail and sometimes they injure themselves badly along the way. But that's how they get better and better and better and better. We look at the real issues. We focus on people. We think of it as a system. And we do it and we're not afraid to fail,
but we're *careful* – we don't want to do a 10-billion-dollar project and fail. We want to divide that project into small hundred-thousand-dollar projects, that if *those* fail, well, they're not fit— We *learn* from those, but by doing many of those, we build up to the larger one, and more likely to have success. That's the argument I want to make. So, actually in the financial community that supports these startups, having a failure is considered a *positive* sign.
Think about that.