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If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.
Valeriya Patrei
May 06, 2024
What do all successful people have in common?
Think of all the success stories you’ve ever heard and the experiences those people had to go through on their path to success.
What was the common theme there?
Struggle.
Adversity.
Judgement.
And they all made mistakes.
Sometimes they had to try again.
Sometimes they had to change their approach.
Sometimes they had to pivot the path.
But they never gave up.
Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
Today, we learn to approach failure productively and see it as a reason to keep going instead of giving up.
Read time: 4.5 minutes
Before we begin: Here’s what you might have missed in April…
In issue #39 of The Productivist, I shared 3 steps to productive transformation. Access the full issue here.
In issue #38, you received 5 powerful tools to enhance your self-image. Read it here.
In issue #37, you discovered how you can make rejection your ally. Check it out here.
In issue #36, I showed you the roadmap from overwhelm to clarity. Walk it again here.
In issue #35, you learnt the advanced time-boxing strategies. Revisit them here.
Which one was your April favourite? Just hit reply and let me know! 🫶
Big idea #1: A failure means the experiment was a success.
The first step to extracting the most out of a failure is to recast it.
Failure doesn’t mean you are terrible.
Failure doesn’t mean you’ll never get it.
Failure doesn’t mean you should give up.
What does it actually mean?
1. You are brave.
To fail you first have to overcome your fear to step outside of your comfort zone and try something unfamiliar.
If you failed => you conquered that fear => you are brave!
This is worth celebrating!
2. The experiment was a success.
Any result with a clear outcome is a win if we look at it as an experiment.
If you recast your 'failed attempt' as a 'new discovery' about a certain method not being appropriate or needing improvement, you are just one step closer to success.
Like Einstein, who didn’t fail 100 times but discovered 100 ways not to light a bulb — each 'failure' edged him closer to illumination!
“Failure is often nothing more than good luck in disguise.”
3. You know your next step.
Experiments point you in the right direction where you need growth and improvement.
The more experiments you do => the more new discoveries you get => the more clear your next step is.
Sometimes, the smartest next step is to let go.
Quitting is not failure. It's strategically choosing a better path.
Big idea #2: You must out-fail the competition.
(This one is Law #21 of Steven Bartlett’s book “The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life”)
If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
In the business world, the key to competition is innovation.
By definition, innovation means venturing into the unexplored, doing what has never been done before.
Therefore, true innovation requires courage to undertake unfamiliar experiments and take risks.
“As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle”
This lesson is crucial when making decisions.
In business, you often need to optimize for speed over accuracy.
The best action you can take is to make the right decision.
The second best is to make a wrong decision and learn from it.
The worst is to remain indecisive.
What happens if you make a wrong decision?
Here’s the choice you are making and how it unfolds:
Make a decision now
Make a decision => It’s wrong => Lose money but learn
=> Make another => It’s wrong => Lose money but learn
=> Make another => It’s wrong => Lose money but learn
… (however many times needed)…
=> Make another => It’s the right decision!
=> Big success with 10x return on all the failures.
OR
Don’t make a decision now.
Don’t make a decision
=> Learn nothing.
=> Fall behind exponentially.
A failure is never as big as the cost of a missed opportunity.
“[At 90% failure rate] If you're running 10,000 experiments, you're still getting 1,000 right”.
The only 3 failures to be avoided:
Repeated
Don't make the same mistakes again and again.
The ones you can learn from others
Save your time and energy by understanding that success leaves cues. Look around for what methods don’t work and what can be improved.
Not even starting
The visual below says it all.
Big idea #3: The 70-20-10 rule of creative output.
Expecting perfection on your first try is like expecting to nail a movie scene in one take.
On rare occasions, the first attempt might indeed be the best, but even the most skilled directors usually take several shots.
It would be absurd for directors to abandon a film idea just because they couldn't perfect it from the first take.
Those missed takes? They’re a part of the process.
So, how can you apply this to your life?
Expect the imperfect.
Not every output will be amazing, and that’s expected.
Focus on volume.
Putting in more reps and iterations is the only path to excellence and mastery.
Embrace the 70-20-10 rule.
In your creative endeavours, expect that:
70% of your work will be mediocre,
20% will be awful, but
10% will be truly outstanding.
“If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.”
The Productivist Challenge: 7 days of reflecting on your failures
This week, dedicate time each day to journal about a past failure that led to a significant breakthrough or learning experience, eventually paving the way to success.
Besides other benefits and insights, reflecting on these moments will remind you of your power to overcome setbacks by learning and growing.
However big or small, I’m sure you have many stories like this. Revisiting 7 of them this week will be incredibly empowering.
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
The Productivist Question
An amateur asks:
“If you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do?”
The Productivist reader asks:
“If you knew that 20 failures would guarantee your dream outcome, how soon would you go after it and what would you try first?“
Have a beautiful week ahead!
Valeriya
PS: Warm welcome to all the new joiners! DM me on LinkedIn to say hi!