The Pursuit of Failure

Shreyas Doshi has had several very good posts on failure, among which is this one:

Failure is the absolute worst way to learn something and sadly so many people spend their entire lives under the illusion that failure is the best way to learn anything.

I agree with this sentiment – that a strange glamorization of failure has developed, treating it as an unalloyed good, or even something to be pursued and coveted. Probably a lot of that is just affect, or performance for the sake of views & follows. But even outside of the online environment, there's maybe a little too much fetishization of failure.

Learning is a great thing to do when you find that you (or someone else) has failed at something. But if you value learning, I wouldn't recommend pursuing failure as a way to learn. As Shreyas points out, there are way better ways to do that!

Certainly you should not be overly afraid of failure, as that can cripple the ability to act. So if telling yourself, "well, at least I'll learn something" is enough to unfreeze yourself, then by all means do so. Likewise, if you find yourself having failed at something, then setting to the task of learning what went wrong and how to do things differently can be a good way to get yourself moving again.

One putative defense of learning from failure that I've sometimes heard, is that one must be careful when learning from success because it's too easy to overgeneralize from success. As if learning from failure is immune to that shortcoming.

It's also important to recognize what level of failure you're talking about. Some version of 'failure' is nearly inevitable when experimenting. But these are small and ancillary failures, a byproduct of experimentation that is directed at learning. And to call it failure in this context is quite subjective – it's all just experimental results, which were only ever intended for learning.