Rethinking Failure

Some quotes from the chapter on failure in Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration that apply to life and ministry as well as business:

Be careful! when you don’t face problems. “It’s really strange,” I told him. “We haven’t had a single big problem on this film.” Many people would have been happy with this news. Not Steve [Jobs]. “Watch out,” he said. “That’s a dangerous place to be.” (Kindle Locations 1697-1699)

Reframe mistakes. “Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).” (Kindle Locations 1717-1718)

Fail early, fail fast. Quoting Andrew Stanton: “fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.” (Kindle Location 1723)

Avoiding failure is failure. “Failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy— trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it— dooms you to fail.” (Kindle Locations 1733-1735)

Leaders set the pace. “If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others.” (Kindle Locations 1757-1758).

Playing it safe leads to death. “Being too risk-averse causes many companies to stop innovating and to reject new ideas, which is the first step on the path to irrelevance…To be a truly creative company, you must start things that might fail.” (Kindle Locations 1870-1873).

Make it less expensive to fail. “To be sure, failure can be expensive. Making a bad product or suffering a major public setback damages your company’s reputation and, often, your employees’ morale. So we try to make it less expensive to fail, thereby taking some of the onus off it.” (Kindle Locations 1822-1824).