Learning from failure vs. learning from success
Plus, Peter Thiel, Kobe Bryant's 10 rules, and what Seinfeld and the Sopranos have in common.
If you go to Silicon Valley, sit down at a bar, and tell somebody your startup failed, he’ll tell you that failure is good. You learned a lot from your failure, right? So now, you’re a step closer to success.
Peter Thiel doesn’t like that advice. He thinks you should learn from success, not from failure.
So who’s right? Both of them are. And so was Kobe Bryant.
The late great Kobe Bryant had 10 rules for life. Rule #6 is “Learn from wins and losses.”
The truth is that there’s lessons from failures and successes. You can learn those lessons — if you know how to find them. Here’s how to find them.
Learning From Failure
Let’s say that you launch an app selling socks online. The app fails. You run out of money and your investors won’t give you another round of funding.
What have you learned? Probably a few things. Maybe you learned that people don’t want to buy socks from an app. Or maybe you learned that you should try not to spend your seed money so fast. Who knows.
The advantage to learning from failure is that the lesson usually sinks in way harder. Pain is more emotionally salient than pleasure, so when we fail, we remember more.
For example, poker players typically remember the big pots they lose better than the big pots they win.
And I’m willing to bet that your most vivid memories are painful moments where you failed.
There’s another advantage of looking at failure as a learning experience: it takes the sting out of it. Failure isn’t fun. It’s easy to get discouraged and quit. But if you tell yourself, “okay, sure, I failed, but now I’m better prepared to succeed next time”, you’re more likely to pick yourself up and keep going.
The disadvantage to learning from failure is that failure only tells you what not to do. If you fail, you know you did something wrong. But you don’t necessarily know what you did wrong. Also, even if you know what you did wrong, you don’t necessarily know what you should’ve done right.
So after you fail, it’s a good idea to sit down and reflect. Journal for a little bit about what happened. Write down all the lessons you think you learned.
Then talk to someone you think is really smart and ask them what they think of those lessons. Maybe some of those lessons you think you learned aren’t really good lessons at all — maybe you just got unlucky, and you’re reading into your failure more than you should. Alternatively, maybe there’s another lesson you should learn that hadn’t crossed your mind.
Learning From Success
This is where you take something that’s working for you and do more of it.
For example, I write marketing emails for a supplement company. I noticed that whenever I send an email talking about going to the gym, they make tons of sales. So, I started writing way more emails about going to the gym.
You don’t have to just learn from your own successes — you can also learn from other people’s success. The Sopranos was one of the most popular TV shows ever, because it was super well-researched and because it showed a great Shakesperian drama. After The Sopranos, there were way more well-researched Shakespearean drama TV shows, like Mad Men and The Wire. In the sit-com world, Seinfeld was a huge hit, and then more people started making TV shows with dark humor. You get the picture.
When you see something that works, then figure out why it works. Then, do more of it.
You can also take the thing that worked and apply it to something else. If you’re a movie director and you see that The Sopranos was a big hit, then you know artsy style TV shows can do really well. Can artsy style movies do really well also? Probably. So maybe you should make an artsy style movie.
Or, if you’re trying to build a social media account to promote your business, you can start posting memes. Maybe no other businesses in your niche are posting memes — but you know that people on social media love memes.
Most people don’t learn from success, because we don’t really like to learn when we’re successful. When we’re successful, we tend to think that everything is hunky-dory and we don’t need to learn anymore.
They’re missing out, because success offers more lessons than failure. When you fail, you know what didn’t work, but you don’t know what would’ve worked. With success, you usually know what works, so you can just keep doing it.
However, be careful: sometimes you’re successful because you got lucky. The best example of this is investing: if you buy a bunch of Tesla stock and then Tesla goes through the roof, that doesn’t mean you can make more money by buying more Tesla stock. That’s because the stock market is basically random: the past doesn’t tell you much about the future.
It’s also important to not learn the wrong lessons from success. In his book The Laws Of Human Nature, Robert Greene dedicates a chapter to Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who had a few early successes, thought he was God, and then made a bunch of stupid decisions that hurt Disney — like putting their Disneyland Europe in Paris instead of sunnier Barcelona.
Whenever you’re successful, you have to be very careful. Recognize that you probably got lucky. And don’t just assume you’ll continue to be successful — realize that you need to work your butt off if you want to succeed!
A Brief Conclusion
I’ll leave you with 3 suggestions. First, look at everything that happens to you as a learning opportunity. And make sure you know how to make the most of that learning opportunity.
Second, watch out. Sometimes life teaches us the wrong lesson. We can make the right move and fail, and we can make the wrong move and succeed. It’s important to know when you made a good play and got unlucky, so you don’t over-correct.
Third, learn to tame your emotions. Don’t let failure get you down, and don’t let success get to your head. Think of yourself as a detective trying to figure out how the world works. You don’t need to let feelings get in your way.
Hey! Thanks for reading.
My name’s Theo and every Monday I publish an article about whatever was on my mind the week before — usually related to social sciences or psychology.
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Happy trails!