"Failure is not an option."

Gene Kranz first said this famous phrase when discussing his time directing NASA's Apollo 13 mission. We use it today to indicate that a plan or idea needs to work, for there'd be drastically negative consequences otherwise.

I'm proposing a slight addendum: "Failure is not an option; it's a requirement."

What we lose sight of beyond the harrowing moments of that Apollo 13 mission is that NASA had to fail a lot to get to even put astronauts in space. Failure is in NASA's DNA... and it led to some of the greatest achievements and inventions in human history. But failure as a catalyst for achievement and growth isn't unique to NASA. It's a core paradigm for all of the most successful leaders.

Alberto Savoia dives deep into practices and policies for failing well in this seminar, but my biggest takeaway for you is to fail quickly, cheaply, and often. This is done using Pretotypes.

Pretotype: an artifact or technique used to collect your own data very quickly and very inexpensively.

These tools should take just a few hours or days to make and should help you validate the necessity for a prototype. Pretotyping is a crucial step in the development process, because you can ensure failures are painless and informative. It's always better to fail (and learn!) in the small things before diving head first into the big things.

Take a few minutes today, and find something to fail at. This is how we build the habit of learning from failure instead of shutting down from it.