5 Ways You Can Learn From the Joy of Failure

One of the best and worst days of my life came in December of 2008. I walked into the unemployment office in Evanston, Illinois, after getting laid off on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

I was sent from one desk to another to collect, fill out, and deliver the appropriate forms. My shoes felt like they weighed about 100 pounds.

It was not a happy place. People looked beat up. Tired. Ready to quit.

Fortunately, I didn’t feel that way. But I could see how easily and quickly a person could get there. So when I walked out of that office I made a vow to never set foot in there again.

I’d been laid off from my agency, a place I’d loved, because we’d lost about 2/3 of our business, for reasons beyond our control. We were top heavy and it made sense that I got cut. So even though it wasn’t performance related, it felt like I’d failed.

If you’ve ever been laid off, you know what I mean.

And while it was a terrible day, it was also an awesome day. Because it was the day I decided to get back to work. I spent that entire day in my local coffeehouse. When I walked out I was highly overcaffeinated and I’d popped the kernels of what was to become my business, Twist.

A familiar story, right? Person fails, person strives, person succeeds. 46% of all Oscar winning movies follow that pattern (OK, I made that up, but it’s probably not that far from the truth).

In reality though, that formula doesn’t compute. Who has the time and money and patience to fail?

Why is the average tenure of a CEO only about 18 months? Why is Congress always turning over? Why are coaches fired and athletes traded and benched and sent down to the minor leagues? We’re generally not real tolerant of failure. So naturally, people don’t like failing.

Actually, scratch that.

Great problem solvers do. Time and again, they talk about the different ways they experience the Joy of Failure and how important it was for them to fail on their way to ultimately succeeding.

Ramaa Krishnan described it beautifully and succinctly:

“Optimism and failure go together. When someone comes to me with a failure situation I think it is their life calling for an upgrade.”

When it comes to problem solving, the importance of failure is as cliché as it is revered. We’re taught about it as students, as business people, as students.

We’re told about Thomas Edison being asked how he endured the thousands of failed experiments on his way to inventing the light bulb and replying, “I’ve found the 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

The pages of Inc. and Fast Company are filled with entrepreneurs’ “fail” stories. So how can I offer something new and insightful about failure?

Because the ways people fail and the lessons they learn are as diverse as their different challenges and solutions, and there’s much to be gained from this broad swath of perspectives. Hearing how people in wildly different professions use failure to help them eventually succeed can be wildly instructive in helping you solve better.

There are more everymans than Edisons. So let’s look at five ways you can benefit from the Joy of Failure.

You can Learn from your mistakes, you can Prototype your way to a better solution, You can Eliminate wrong answers, you can Fail Fast, and you can use failure as Motivation.

Learning from failure is certainly true in the world of science, as articulated by the Gatorade Sports Science Institute founder, Dr. Robert Murray:

“Often you learn more by failing than by succeeding in a scientific laboratory. There are far more failures than successes. With success it’s nice that things work out and you get some credit for it. But failure creates the introspection you need to make yourself better. It’s a valuable part of the process.“

If you assume making mistakes in the world of accounting is a bad thing, you’d be right. But it’s impossible to avoid, and Robert Frueh, and VP of taxes at Anixter, talked about the importance of learning from it:

“Is it good to make mistakes? I don’t think anyone would say it’s good. I don’t know if we’d high five each other if there’s an adverse consequence we could have avoided. But they’re going to happen. I think we’ve gotten good at learning from mistakes and not repeating them.”

On the other side of the professional spectrum is Confectionista Katherine Duncan, maker of handmade caramels and chocolates:

“Failing has been good for me. I failed almost every day when I started out. Chocolate is very sensitive and can burn easily. You can’t just melt it; you need to temper it. It’s very precise; you need to heat it to 110?, then cool it down to 90?. 120? may burn it. And if it sets up too easy, it can crack. When I first started I was undertempering, creating a thinner bond. Half of our truffles cracked. I had no idea, but I know it now and we have maybe 5% that crack.”

I once wrote a commercial about an Australian triathlete named Chris Legh who collapsed 50 meters from the finish line in the Hawaii Ironman triathlon, after swimming 2.4 miles, riding 112 more on his bike, and running almost an entire 26.2 mile marathon.

It became one of Gatorade’s most popular and successful commercials. Part of it was due to the dramatic real footage of Chris trying to crawl those last 50 meters. It was gut wrenching to watch and sharply made the point that even the most elite athletes can fall short when they’re not properly hydrated.

But the highlight of the commercial is the payoff at the end. After we see Chris go through extensive training at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, where we find out that he learned how to better prepare for his races, we see him break the tape and win the Coeur d’Alene triathlon.

Would he have won at Coeur D’Alene had he not failed and learned about what he needed to do to truly excel? Possibly. But what happened after the failure is what helped him eventually win; the way he learned how to not fail the next time. And it resonated with consumers who appreciated the deep knowledge Gatorade had when it came to hydrating athletes. It was a compelling story, and other than the massive thighs and neoprene suit, not much different from that of Thomas Edison and his 10,000 failures.

When it comes to working your way through failure by prototyping, engineers immediately come to mind. Like Allison Bedell, human-centered designer and engineer in the medical device industry:

“How do you know you have something right? Prototyping. It’s true for writing papers, creating presentations…everything I do as an engineer. You see problems, you try things. You role play. We’ll build things using foam core, box cutters, whatever materials are at hand. We’re always building and experimenting to learn from what doesn’t work, to make it better.”

And iOS developer Jonah Grant, who built the first version of the iPhone app Belly:

“Early on at Belly, the product wasn’t good. The thing about startups is, what you put out first is shit. Horrible. And you know it. But you need something to show, get it out the door, be there first. When you can see why something isn’t working, it’s fun to think of ways to fix that.”

Not fun for everyone. But fun for great problem solvers.

Stay tuned for part two and the other three ways you can use failure to help you succeed.

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Danny Schuman is Founder and Head Twister at Twist, a marketing and innovation consultancy in Chicago. Back when he made TV commercials, he lost a high stakes ($5) game of pool to Michael Jordan but got a pretty good commercial out of it. He's currently writing his book The Joy of Solving and speaking and workshopping the subject in various public and corporate venues, including his lab at Chicago Ideas Week. He thanks you for going here to sign up for his soonish-to-be published newsletter and hear more about The Joy of Solving.