Failure is the foundation of success; success is the lurking place of failure.” Lao Tzu
What Lao Tzu meant is that success creates a set of blinders that make you extremely vulnerable. Success is the single greatest predictor of failure. Meanwhile, forward progress depends on experimentation which understandably has a large failure rate.
There is a huge pile of technology that we are trying to absorb under the rubric of ‘social media’. Many of the current efforts will look laughable in the not-too-distant-future. Trying them on and discarding them is the only way to make forward progress.
Failure is vastly underrated. The fair haired children and ivy league managers want to run and hide from it. But, failure is the essence of life. Great athletes are the ones who only fail 70% of the time. Great sales people are the ones who only fail 85% of the time. Failing is how you get to success. It’s the people who refuse to fail who are really dangerous. Here are several links that examine and celebrate failure.
- Five reasons to discuss project failure,
- Why Designers Fail
- Failure Magazine Articles like “Learning From Inexcusable Business failure” and, of course, theFailure Store
- How failure breeds success If it’s in business week, it’s got to be true.
- DeMotivational Posters of course.
- Failure Is The Mother of Innovation
- Harvard Business Review Blog on Failure in the Social Sector