Why “Fail Early and Often” is Wrong

You should be learning from your successes, not your failures

Failure is not good for you. Entrepreneurs who are told that failure is a treasure chest full of valuable startup lessons are being sold a false — and sometimes self-fulfilling — bill of goods.

“Fail early and often” is another one of those tired advice soundbites I dislike. Not because it’s flat-out wrong, but because it rarely comes with the necessary context.

I know the stench of failure. I’ve wallowed in the misfortune of my own making more than I care to admit. And I’ll be the first to tell you that those failures came with very poignant lessons about what not to do. But seriously, I could have read those lessons online — or at least somebody could have given me a heads up.

The truth is that you need to minimize failure and all the painful learnings that come with it. Instead, you should be learning from your individual successes, small and large, at every step of the journey. Not only are these lessons more frequent, they come with a lot fewer setbacks.

Learning from success is a much more valuable opportunity than learning from failure, as long as you remember to take the time to do it — which very few entrepreneurs do.