Fail fast, fail often. And then?

As a society, as a community, and as an ecosystem, we have come a long way in terms of our thinking, our approach, and our belief systems. Arguably, there are certain fronts on which we still need to progress but overall, we have taken giant strides towards advancement.

One such phenomenon is “failure”. Historically, success and failure were two ends of a spectrum. Even by definition, however premature it may sound, failure is the lack of success.

In the year 800 BC in Greece, failed business merchants had to sit in the marketplace with a basket on their heads. In the 17th century in France, failed and incompetent business owners were put under the spotlight, where their bankruptcy was publically announced.

Looking at such horrifying instances of reprimanding failures, we have certainly covered a lot of ground. From a culture that openly disdained failure, we have now stepped into a culture that has begun accepting failure.

Museum of Failure

While we hail some of the magnanimous tech innovations and new products in the market, ironically there also exists a museum that celebrates failed products.

The Museum of Failure, based out of Switzerland boasts of some of the world’s most disastrous failures. The failure level must meet the criteria set by the owner Samuel West, and “simple flops” are not adorned. 

• Nokia N Gage – Nokia’s herculean attempt to marry game consoles with a phone failed miserably. The design flaws and lack of games led people to call it a “taco phone”
• Apple Newton – A device that didn’t have a keyboard and had handwriting recognition enabled. However, software updates took ages, and ultimately the apple of Apple’s eyes flopped
• Google glass – An uber cool product, but ended up being buggy, had no real applications and Google failed to acknowledge the privacy concerns it brought along

And the iconic collection is growing by the day. The museum has 150+ products and counting.

On similar grounds, Leticia Gasca, an entrepreneur launched Fuckup nights - a platform for people to share their epic failure stories with aplomb and not be embarrassed about it. “I realized that sharing your failures makes you stronger, not weaker”, she says.

These amazing stories can make one sit back and laud the efforts of people who have not just owned up to their failures but helped others too significantly.

Fail fast? Then what?

While we might have learned to place failure on a pedestal, we are yet not mindful of it.

“Fail fast, fail often” has been quite a cliched quote but it misses an extremely important element – Failing mindfully.

Almost every nook and corner of Silicon Valley are mushrooming with new startups where the recipe for success is a horrendous failure. 

Innovations are the bedrock of a start-up, and these innovations are backed by tons of experience with failure. They are still figuring out their business model, and process flows, creating prototypes with a minute chance of getting it right the first time. Hence, failure is highly valued and is a norm. 

However, in an established setup, their devised ways of working are yielding returns and hence, any new experimentation might damage their reputation. Only after thorough examination, investigation, and feasibility analysis, do they incorporate changes in their modus operandi.

This is what we call “failing mindfully” – when you are aware of the repercussions of a change and its expected failure, the preparation is brought in place to mitigate the impact.

The co-founder of the Fuckup nights, Leticia Gasca talked about this in one of her talks.

In the world of startups, failing fast is the real mantra nowadays. Even though it accelerates the learning, and rakes in more moolah, who bears the brunt of it? It’s the ground-level employees whose sole earning depends on the successful running of the business. If these founders can start being more failure-mindful, it will not just positively impact the people but also the communities and the overall ecosystem at large.

When you adopt a change, along with the possibility of a failure, there are also consequences whose impact can be far more damaging. Being aware of it in totality is considered being mindful. So ultimately, don’t be embarrassed or hesitant to fail but when you do, don’t forget to fail mindfully.