How to Fail \ stacker news ~mostly

16.1k sats \ 39 comments \ @k00b 21 Jan mostly_harmless

separate the success you need from the success you want

Thriving demands clean water, nutritious food, and great friends. If you're healthy and have those things, everything else is extra. When you only need essentials, you can fail as fast and as frequently as your time on Earth will allow.

it's about quantity not quality

Becoming skilled at failing is like becoming skilled at anything. You express your present skill level as frequently as you can at the cost of nearly all other measures of performance. You'll make an earnest and diligent attempt at something, and to fail, something needs to be something that you're unlikely to succeed at.

You may notice that as your failures grow, you begin to succeed reflexively and inadvertently. When this happens, you only need to find something harder that you'll definitely fail at.

embrace your weakness

Most of us have self-prophesies about our strength. This is only useful for manipulating ourselves and others into believing we can't fail. Fortunately lies don't survive contact with reality. Test your strength through action, not your stories about its action, and discover how to fail.

If you are in fact strong, you may feel like you can't fail, but you can. Any strength has limits beyond which we are weak. Strength often has a narrow area of application too. To fail, identify those limits and pursue feats of strength beyond them.

surround yourself with failures

Successful people often teach us how to succeed but not how to fail. They tend to omit their failures and over generalize their success. We succeed by failing until we succeed or by getting lucky, and often we can't tell which made us successful exactly. One surprising way to fail is to take a successful person's wrong advice.

To learn how to fail as fast as possible, find people diligently failing to do the something you want to fail at. Move near them virtually and physically and learn how to fail with them. You will inherit their experience and increase your quantity of fails passively.

steer into skids

It's our nature to avoid failing. Seek discomfort to find ways to fail. Seek a quality of discomfort similar to the discomfort of puberty. Puberty is confusing, awkward, and exciting. It's a rapid and automatic succession of misunderstandings and novel failures. Puberty is what growth feels like and failing at worthwhile things will feel similar. To fail, pursue these feelings.

Learn how to fail because failure accompanies growth.

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2837 sats \ 7 replies \ @gmd 22 Jan

Reminds me of a recent podcast I listened to that really resonated with me about why smart kids often struggle to find success later in life. Growing up in a small pond I was always the top student in every class, Valedictorian, perfect SATs etc and I tied success and my identity to “not trying”.

Once I left that pond and found a lot of people I thought were effortlessly much smarter than me, I think I really sort of gave up on my potential because I had learned to associate working hard with being a failure instead of embracing challenges like I should have.

When you struggle earlier in life you’ve given yourself permission to fail and can be better equipped mentally to work through challenges. I think I could have been a lot more successful in life if I had correctly identified hard work and failure as a virtue rather than immediately labeling myself as not being good enough.

485 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 22 Jan

This is basically a re-statement of Dweck's "mindset" research, which has had some trouble replicating but which strikes me as 100% true, based on examples from my own life and things I hear about from other people.

526 sats \ 0 replies \ @aoeu 22 Jan

Reminds me of a parenting tip that we read somewhere. There was a study done comparing the performance of kids doing a new and difficult task. The kids that were told that they were smart struggled because they were frustrated that they couldn't do the task well since they were smart. The ones that were told that they were good learners excelled because they realized that being smart is more about putting the effort in rather than having things come naturally to you.

130 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b OP 22 Jan

Pursuing challenge is irrational. I largely let my emotions pick my challenges and let what little intelligence I have figure it out from there.

Maybe I'll write another essay "How to be dumb"

185 sats \ 3 replies \ @ek 23 Jan

Maybe I'll write another essay "How to be dumb"

You're like the hero we need but don't deserve.

35 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b OP 24 Jan

I'm the hero no one wants but all deserve.

1514 sats \ 1 reply \ @Nuttall 28 Jan

I'm the hero that my mother warned me about. I always laughed when she warned me about the wrong kids because I was the ring leader.

I enjoyed this post that you wrote. Contrarian thought is very good. It's a kind of discipline that happens in construction all of the time. We argue, curse, curse each other, blame, cat call, howl and it would seem deliberately try not to work together to achieve results. As intense as our arguments are in the time span of 3 minutes we accomplish more than a carefully orchestrated meeting does. It's brute force and will arguing with reality and then, poof, we have accomplished a better product than someone else who gave up years ago and never pushed through.

Once while finishing concrete on a very hot day my uncle pointed out that I was finishing the surface of the sidewalk too nicely in one small area and that I had 300 more feet to do. He said, "We may loose that battle but we have to win the war." I learned to quickly master the surface in waves of rough to smooth.

664 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 28 Jan

Once while finishing concrete on a very hot day my uncle pointed out that I was finishing the surface of the sidewalk too nicely in one small area and that I had 300 more feet to do. He said, "We may loose that battle but we have to win the war." I learned to quickly master the surface in waves of rough to smooth.

Ha, nice story! That in turn reminded me how I once told my sister that it's not about being clean, it's more about looking clean. Was more in jest but there was some truth in it.

It was more important to me to make everything look clean first and then I would care about the details.

518 sats \ 5 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 22 Jan

What is your most recent failure? Whether big or small.

Mine is trying too hard to get a new storage type into Mutiny, which I recently threw away and will face minor consequences for. The biggest failure in this was the "trying too hard" part. There were signs on the wall that I ignored when I try to fail fast, and I proceeded anyways.

109 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b OP 22 Jan

The last section of this essay. It's half of what I needed to say and I tried to force it into being all that I needed to say because I got impatient.

Also, this sentence:

We succeed by failing until we succeed or by getting lucky

I tend to do this a lot even in speech where I think I'm being unclear so I'll kind of restate the same word and blend it all together.

497 sats \ 3 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 22 Jan

The last section of this essay.

A fun thought experiment on SN is to have everyone live list their failures in a day to normalize that we all fail all the time. Now I'm trying to think about how my last failure was probably not the last and I've got hundreds more recent than that lol.

We succeed by failing until we succeed or by getting lucky

There's a chance that it's not failures that define anything but rather forming your life around trying a ton of things with a specific percentage chance. If you took an action that took one year and had a 60% success rate at something huge, vs something that took a day and had a 1% success rate as something huge, the ones that take the smallest amount of time, thus a person makes the most amount of failures, is more about what defines eventual success.

I think about this a lot when it comes to MVPs in a startup.

1399 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 22 Jan

If you took an action that took one year and had a 60% success rate at something huge, vs something that took a day and had a 1% success rate as something huge

This is really interesting actually. Let's say "something huge" has the exact same payoff in each case. If every day I take the 1% chance, I'd yield something huge in 100 days on average. If I take the 60% chance, 2 years on average.

I think about this a lot when it comes to MVPs in a startup.

There's definitely an optimum percent chance vs time spent proving it out. For shipping the MVP of a product from scratch, I'd say 4-8 weeks. For shipping the MVP of a major feature 2-4 weeks.

I started thinking about things this way after reading about Pieter Levels doing 12 startups in 12 months. He ended up with a hit in 4-5 months with nomadlist.

An independent source of validation that This is the Way is this quantity vs quality parable.

369 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 22 Jan

I love that parable. It's probably not 100% true for everything, but for creative production, in my experience, it is 100% true. I have lived it and seen others who have lived it longer, better, and it stays true and the returns keep getting bigger.

And yet there is this insidious force that, in many cases, pushes us back from this. It is bonkers to contemplate. I have lived that part, too.

578 sats \ 0 replies \ @Nuttall 28 Jan

I had a friend who was very busy, very smart, very doing all kinds of things: web development, linux servers, code, wood work, music instrument builds, cooking and keeping his house always clean. I said, "How do you do all of this stuff and I never see you spend a lot of time cleaning but your home is always clean?"

Philip answered, " I always clean up 25% percent every day."

He was that smart. Much smarter than I was. Spending time with more experienced failures is truly a wise decision. The difference in discrimination and wisdom is don't spend time with people who have given up because they don't want to fail. I've been that person. It sucks. It's the best way to work hard at doing nothing.

879 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 21 Jan

One refinement, from my perspective: even being in a position to fail is kind of an advanced move, and a rare one.

There's vast swathes of modern life that's never made concrete enough to ascertain success or failure, it's like you're living in a purgatory of non-action, non-striving. You vaguely intend numerous things, but don't commit to any of them, or take responsibility for them, and so the undertaking can't be said to have failed, nor succeeded. It lives a ghost's unlife in your mind, looming over it all, haunting away potential dedicated efforts.

Getting to the point where something is at stake would therefore be great progress. Whatever happens from there -- success, failure -- is of less import. I can work with either. It's hard to work with nothing. And yet such a siren song, to keep yourself safe! To not aspire. To not put anything on any line.

It's our nature to avoid failing.

Sigh.

249 sats \ 0 replies \ @Nuttall 28 Jan

This is a geat book by Dale Carneggie: How to Stop Worry and Start Living

https://ia801400.us.archive.org/2/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.188253/2015.188253.How-To-Stop-Worrying-And-Start-Living.pdf

130 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 21 Jan

being in a position to fail is kind of an advanced move, and a rare one

True but then you describe what sounds like a failure, albeit a meta-failure, to put something at stake. I think my own words here would suggest to begin putting stuff, anything, and randomly if need be, at stake, and do it over and over again and let yourself fail to put the right stuff at stake.

to keep yourself safe!

Gross :)

858 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 21 Jan

That's a good way to put it: meta-failure.

889 sats \ 1 reply \ @davidw 22 Jan

Great reminder.

Funnily enough… Kids don’t need to be taught this. Only teenagers and adults do.

109 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 22 Jan

It might be a function of schools really. Idk though

379 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 22 Jan

Yeah, keeping costs down is key.

You don't need that flashy website or business card.

If you want to create something useful, help someone. One person.

868 sats \ 1 reply \ @oliverweiss 21 Jan

We had a session about “learning to fail” in my company some days ago as part of a psychological safety training. For me these things are always like stating the obvious, but good to hear from time to time.

120 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Jan

They are obvious which is why I'm not shy about saying them. It's one thing to understand these and another to live them though.

I wrote this as much for me as anyone else. There are things I'm afraid of failing at that I know I shouldn't be and I needed to remind myself how to fail.

404 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 21 Jan

I believe I coined this saying:

The road to success is paved with failures.

119 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 21 Jan

I wrote this because I went down a related posts rabbit hole, landed here, where I was reminded that @evanbaer asked for a top five list.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @evanbaer 25 Jan

Nice! Bookmarked this.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @spraveenitpro 22 Jan

Learn how to fail because failure accompanies growth.

👏🏽

20 sats \ 4 replies \ @Fabs 21 Jan

So, how do you create those headers?

I've looked into the GitHub-link from your comment, but haven't been able to recreate it.

It reads that one has to either # word # or ## word ##, depending on the size one wants, but that doesn't work for me.

Can you type - with spaces - how you type these headers?

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 22 Jan

₿

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Jan

You can view the styling on my post here: #395797/edit

The only reason this might not work is if you don't put a space after #

this is a heading the markup is:

# this is a heading the markup is:

#this isn't a heading the markup is: #this isn't a heading the markup is:

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @Fabs 22 Jan

Is this the way?

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 22 Jan

Ha! It is!

11 sats \ 2 replies \ @cleaningup12 22 Jan

Comment on a post 14hrs later so it gets completely ignored

465 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 22 Jan

Not on my watch.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 24 Jan

I don't know how I ended up here.

clicks back button

Oh right, I went through @elvismercury's recent comments

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei 23 Jan

Such a great post replete with wisdom. Understanding your WHY is pivotal because attracting the wrong kind of success can make you feel just as lonely as struggling to make it. And the point about how successful people may dish out wrong advice. Well, no one is infallible

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @watchmancbiz 24 Mar

I'll never be a failure til I give up

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kurszusz 28 Jan

There are many ways to fail, the aspects mentioned in your article are the most common, and they occur most often.

But my is: you only fail if you give it up! ;)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Nuttall 28 Jan

The only way to succeed is to go through it.