Successes are more informative than failures. If you succeed, everything has gone right, so there’s a lot more information in successes than failures. The brain probably evolved to take advantage of successes because there’s more information there.
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Successes are more informative than failures. If you succeed, everything has gone right, so there’s a lot more information in successes than failures. The brain probably evolved to take advantage of successes because there’s more information there.
Chad Garrett
on 09 Sep 09Sure, that may be true. But getting to the success requires a lot of the information to be already learned. Our focus shouldn’t be waiting on a happy accident, should it?
Seems obvious that we don’t lock things into long-term memory on a failure. But our short term memory has to be using failures to guide us to our success, right?
Matt
on 09 Sep 0937signals has been pushing this “you learn more from successes than failures” meme now for a long time, but I think it’s too clever by half.
The people who’ve pushed the whole “You can learn from your failures” idea aren’t actually arguing that failures are more informative or valuable than success.
The idea is this… because most people are afraid to fail, they can’t summon the motivation to try.
So, someone came up with the bright idea… “Let’s emphasize the fact that EVEN IF you fail, you’ll learn a tremendous amount, and, as a result, be that much closer to success.”
The idea is to reduce the fear of failure; it’s not to argue that failure teaches more than success.
37signals has just created a silly straw man, then thinks itself really smart arguing against it.
David Stewart
on 09 Sep 09This has got to be one of the worst quotes ever. Even from a grammatical standpoint it is bad. Plus, the link is to some ABC news article?
Jay Owen
on 09 Sep 09I agree. There is more to be learned from success than failure. That does not mean that we can’t learn from a failure. Clearly, there is something to be learned from every experience in life and in business, but with success, most things went right and that can be more easily repeated than trying to find the things that went wrong (which may be multiple) in a failed project.
Ian Lesperance
on 09 Sep 09The flip side to this is that if you succeed despite your methods, you could perpetuate techniques or ways of thinking that you shouldn’t. Maybe they’re innocuous: you perform a rain dance and it rains, so you keep doing it; or maybe they’re dangerous: you sacrifice a person and it yields a good crop, so you keep doing it.
OsandiSays
on 09 Sep 09YOU WILL NOT READ THIS… the way it is intended. I believe that success in fact blinds the eye to innovation. Look at all of the successful car companies from the industrial revolution. DONE and gone BYE BYE.
Humans are the only specie that rate ‘success’. What else in nature places such a stamp on the process and engagement of outcomes?
::[[REMEMBER….’CAUSE=EFFECT’. If the cause is problem solving then perhaps you’ll come across a SOLUTION]]::
Failure is more they way sh!t really works. The idea ‘if it ain’t broke, fix it’ is a thing of the past and is dying with mass production and consumption of Things.
Design is teaching us to break things first, review, get feedback, tweak and break it again.
Success is subjectively flawed insomuch as it is a false reality. It’s all process, process, PROCESS: bluePrint to a larger building block called the inevitable END!
:}(o|O){:
Dave!
on 09 Sep 09Have to agree with the comments so far… that quote (and I think the posting of it) misses the point.
Of course we should learn from successes. Duh. But it’s also important for people to understand that failures have valuable lessons to teach. And by realizing that, you can take some of the fear out of failing; even if you do fail, you can be better for having tried.
It’s that fear of failing that stops most people in their tracks. If more people looked at failures as something that happens normally when you take risks, but that you can learn from them and move on, less people would be paralyzed by fear.
Posting quotes like this just helps perpetuate that wrongheaded idea that you should fear failure.
Dave!
on 09 Sep 09@Ian Lesperance
It’s like a friend of mine says about rain dances… you know why they work? Because you don’t stop dancing until it rains.
Anonymous Coward
on 09 Sep 09“Posting quotes like this just helps perpetuate that wrongheaded idea that you should fear failure.”
You should fear failure just like you should fear pain. They are bad things.
Davide Di Cillo
on 09 Sep 09I think people has to learn from both: what’s working and what’s not.
Usually failures and mistakes happen cause you are pushing outside the borders of success. Of course it’s very important to learn from the success, but sometimes moving far from those can help you to make a leap, to find innovation. Otherwise everything would work in the same way, doing the same thing, offering the same features.
Marc Hedlund
on 09 Sep 09Why does one have to be a better teacher than the other?
I’ve known people who believe one success makes them a genius; and others that believe one failure (or many) makes them a fool, and I’ve found myself disagreeing with both.
I disagree completely with the quote; what you need is a way to learn from all your experiences, good or bad. A healthy process to learn valuable lessons without bearing too hard on circumstantial quirks benefits you in whatever situation you find yourself.
JF
on 09 Sep 09The quote said nothing about failure not being valuable or that there’s nothing to learn from failure.
It just said “Successes are more informative than failures” and that ”...there’s a lot more information in successes than failures.”
You may disagree with that POV, but the quote doesn’t disparage learning from failure too.
Jumper
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Derek Scruggs
on 11 Sep 09“Success” is relative and is often in the context of failure. A couple years ago I taught myself to unicycle. In the first day or so, just making a single turn of the wheel was a success. Later that bar was raised to 10 feet, 10 yards, 100 yards etc.
Martial
on 11 Sep 09“Failure” only happens if you stop. “Success” only arrives after overcoming challenges that other people might see as failures. Of course you learn more from success: you’ve overcome more failures.
I think this whole silly argument turns on what we mean by failure and what sort of time frame we’re talking about. Some people just don’t see setbacks as failures, while some do. Some of both types pick themselves up and keep on plugging and some of both sit on the curb and cry.
Jason Cohen
on 13 Sep 09An argument that successes are in fact less informative than failures is that it’s a classic case of survivor bias.
Details: http://tinyurl.com/pdjqvh
Briefly: When something is a success you DO NOT KNOW which factors were critical to that success.
My opinion: By contrasting successes against failures, we can learn.
For example: 37signals is successful by keeping things simple, but e.g. Adobe Photoshop is successful by keeping things massively complicated. So “simplicity” is not a prerequisite for success.
My opinion #2: It’s more important to have a consistent philosophy than any one particular philosophy.
This discussion is closed.