Recently, I was listening to the below episode of The Knowledge Project with Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify.
The whole episode is great, but one line in particular stood out to me. Tobi says he never makes a wasted mistake, and he does this because he defines failure as,
the discovery of things that did not work
This is a very similar idea to Thomas Edison, who once said,
I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work
This was intriguing to me because it seemed to be a totally different interpretation of failure than I was accustomed to. At the lowest moments in my life, I’ve expressed damaging thoughts and applied labels to myself, which usually constitute something along the lines of: I have failed or I am a failure.
But when I say that, what does failure actually mean? Curiously, dictionaries often define it as a “lack of success”.
I realized I have been following this definition by the book. I’d argue this has been harmful because it is based on the premise that failure is universally bad. It is a “lack” of something rather than the existence of something. Moreover, this definition assumes a rooted desire for achievement. The opposite—success—is much more than achievement. So then the natural question is, what does success really mean?
I think success can mean many different things, based on the context. I am currently taking an intro python class, and I liked the way they defined success:
If you have learned something, you have been successful
I noticed how this is not a measurement around achievement. I won’t be ranked or graded. It’s solely about learning.
So how do I learn? I learn from doing.
And I realize that when I do something for the first time, I may not be very good. I am not very good at coding right now. But I am learning. Will I get better? Maybe. I could also not get better and find it uninteresting and stop doing it altogether. I could fail.
On the flip side, when I first started writing, I wasn’t very good. But I was learning. And I started getting better. And I continued doing it. Now I am a little better. And I hopefully will keep getting better.
And that’s the interesting dilemma. The risk with doing something—anything really—is that I don’t know whether it will be a success or failure. That is what is often preventing me from starting something new and taking a chance. I want certainty. Yet one of the few certainties in life is uncertainty.
If I define both success and failure around learning rather than the outcome, I will be more likely to put myself out there. I will find what doesn’t work, and importantly, what does.
It is clear that visionaries and entrepreneurs like Edison and Lütke understand this. They have a mentality that failure is not a negative. Their failures were critical discoveries, and crucially that’s why they have been so successful.