Day 264: How to Fail!

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

In law school, we usually teach students never to be in a position to fail. When they take a test, they should know all the possible material beforehand. When they take testimony from a client, they should never ask a question they don’t already know the answer to.

That mindset will crush any entrepreneurial venture.

Every venture involves “failure.” I put that in quotes because there’s really no such thing as failure in business. As entrepreneur Jay Samit likes to say, in every venture, “you earn or you learn.”

The key question is not whether you fail. You will, in many ways. The question is how you respond to that failure.

Why Did You Fail?

First, you’ll need to identify the core reasons your venture didn’t go as you expected. Some possible reasons:

You lost focus;

You lacked key skills;

Your process was inadequate;

You experimented with a few ideas to figure out which ones didn’t work.

How Can You ‘Fail Forward’?

Not all types of failure are bad. Some, like losing focus, may require you to reorganize and recommit. Others, like lacking skills or processes, may require you to retool and relaunch. Others, like experimenting to find out what works (and what doesn’t), are highly productive parts of the entrepreneurship method.

Once you’ve identified the reason you failed, you can use that knowledge to “fail forward,” in Samit’s words. Your next iteration or your next venture will build on what you’ve learned.

Training Your Brain to Spot Pivot Opportunities

When you use failure to move in a new and smarter direction, that’s a “pivot.” What’s more, you can train the “pivoting muscles” in your brain.

Successful entrepreneurs learn to spot opportunities to redirect that others might miss by practicing forms of “play” that require seeing new directions.

Today in Entrepreneurship for Lawyers, for example, we moved from our discussion of failure to a theater game called FREEZE.

In FREEZE, all the players stand in a circle, with two people in the middle. Those in the middle are given a scenario to act out improvisationally.

After a few minutes, one player in the circle calls out, “FREEZE.” The players in the middle freeze in whatever position they were in. The player who yelled out takes the place of one of the players in the middle, and assumes the same position.

But here’s the twist: The new player in the middle must introduce a completely different scenario, with different characters. The players then proceed with the new scene until some else says “FREEZE.”

Games like FREEZE are fun to play. But they also train your brain at pattern recognition and build new neural networks. They teach you to see like an entrepreneur.

Because an entrepreneur never “fails” - they earn or they learn!