An archive of anecdotes on why you should embrace failure.
I’m going to tell you something completely counterintuitive. Society doesn’t explicitly agree with it and you might not either—at least initially. It sounds self-destructive but is necessary for growth.
Failure is invaluable.
Crazy, I know. But hear me out. From my studies of great leaders and entrepreneurs, this common theme of not only tolerating but embracing failure has been universal and necessary. It has been one of the most frequently repeated insights. I am yet to hear a single success story where the journey had been smooth and without multiple failures along the way.
This is important to know for two reasons. First, failure itself is valuable because you learn and grow from it. Second, you should not avoid challenging endeavors due to fear of failure because it is both inevitable and valuable.
Though vital and inevitable, failure is usually uncomfortable and scary. We tend to avoid it at all costs. We don’t pursue greatness to avoid embarrassment or let down. We avoid potentially life-changing opportunities purely out of fear of the F word.
What’s the worst that can happen? No. What’s the best that can happen?
When failure is embraced, growth is nurtured. Look at it this way, every failure is simply a lesson learned. And when you experience many lessons, what does that make you? The answer is wise. But to welcome these lessons requires surrendering your ego and being comfortable with vulnerability. Being comfortable with the possibility of failure.
That’s as far as I will go with my personal explanation. The rest of this page will be a working collection of a few of my favorite quotes from other successful people sharing their take on the value of embracing failure.
- “Rejection is redirection” – Unknown
- “Failure is success in progress” – Albert Einstein
- “You only need to be right once.” – Naval Ravikant
- “Failure is irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.” – Elon Musk
- “Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.” – Henry Ford
- “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison
- “Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” – Coco Chanel
- “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm” – Winston Churchill
- “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan
- “On the way to school, 10 yo asked “What if I’m a failure?” I told him that at least some of his projects would probably fail, and that if they didn’t, it would mean he was being too conservative.” – Paul Graham
- “Every experiment yields a result that others can build on. If you test a hypothesis honestly & it “fails,” that knowledge is a victory & saves others from wasting efforts and is a part of the foundation of shared knowledge. The only failure is to not try.” – Unknown
- “My dad growing up would actually encourage me to fail. So I would come home from school and he would say to my brother and me, so what’d you guys fail at this week? And if I didn’t have something, he would actually be disappointed. So, you know, it flipped the whole model on its head and I would come home from school and I can remember I’d be like, dad, dad, I tried out for this and I was horrible. And he’d be like, way to go. And he’d high five me. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was just changing my definition of failure. My definition of failure became not about the outcome, but about not trying.” – Sara Blakely [link]. She used that mindset of failure to persist through rejection and hardship to ultimately build a billion-dollar company starting with just $5,000.
- Jeff Bezos wrote in his 2018 annual Amazon shareholder letter,
“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. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society.
The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.” - Ray Kroc was a high school dropout, then a struggling salesman. It wasn’t until he was 52 years old that he took over McDonald’s. Today, McDonald’s feeds approximately 1% of the world’s population DAILY.
We just happen to have made more money than almost any other firm in existence.”
Economic Motivation 