Why learn from failure if you want to succeed

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If you try your whole life to learn from successful people and consider only the companies that are leading in the industry as examples, then your picture of the world will be distorted and incomplete. There is a good advice: study the history of projects from the point of view of "how not to do it", find out what disappears from sight, how many attempts were made before you to implement your plans. And you shouldn't look for this information in beautiful biographies.

We all strive to be successful in some area: at work, in business, in sports, in the family - in general, in life. And, not knowing how to achieve this success, we begin to read the stories of celebrities, take trainings, consult with successful people.

However, following such advice, only a small part of people achieve their goals. And those who manage to reach the top say that they did a lot differently and they were a little lucky at some stage.

According to statistics, 90% of startups fail, 97% of Forex traders fail, and a few achieve at least something in sports. And note that nowhere is described or written about losers, their mistakes are not analyzed in principle, which is a delusion.

Those who lost go into oblivion, they are not invited to give interviews, and books are not written about them. There are only references on the Internet.

Everyone is offered glossy success stories of this or that project: Facebook, Apple, Euroset.

And everyone, under marketing pressure, begins to buy books of successful people, listen to their slogans, try to repeat their algorithm of actions, undergo expensive trainings. But often this method of achieving success does not work.

In fact, when you start asking celebrities about their success, learning the nuances, they usually cannot fully articulate their success algorithm. And almost all of them say that much of their success is a matter of chance, a move made in time or outside help. To put it simply - luck.

When you want to be successful in your project, no matter what, start studying the history of a successful project and first of all go back to the beginning: look at the sequence of actions, if they look strange, if they look like a series of disconnected decisions. Weren't there spontaneous stupid decisions that are now mistaken for genius?

Also study those projects that started at the same time as the “greatest” ones: why they failed, at what stage did they leave, how many such projects were there.

We must learn to understand not only success stories, but also failure stories. Failures contain more information than great stories of victories, be it in the field of business, Internet projects, sports. Everything is in front of my eyes, there is much more data: solutions, terms, resources, niche … But everyone is trying to learn how to succeed by the example of successful ones.

When you try to replicate the success of another person, you rarely take into account the fact that this path is in his reality, and not in yours, and therefore you do not take into account many factors. And these factors over time can lead to the collapse of the project.

Always be skeptical when offered candy in a bright wrapper. Remember that many people have followed this path before you, and where are they all? Lost, burned out, did not make it. It is worth investigating why they did it this way and not otherwise.

Always analyze the circumstances of your life, you should not blindly follow someone else's path.

Sony PlayStation success story

In the early days of the world's most successful game console, 1993-1994, when Sega and Nintendo ruled the world, new gaming and technical capabilities were needed. Sony at that time had nothing to do with the gaming industry. It was Nintendo who invited her into the industry, instructing Sony to contract to create the hardware for its next-generation gaming console.

Thanks to this, Sony received useful data: information on financial turnover and technologies, statistics. And the leaders of the company realized that they wanted to create their own product - a new, conceptual, different from others.

It's all a matter of chance. But luck is just the beginning. Sony analyzed the unsuccessful launches of other game consoles at the time. And Sega, with its own format discs, and Nintendo, with large and expensive cartridges, have already tried. Even Panasonic has released its own console with uninteresting games.

Here are some of the mistakes other companies made:

• the complexity of the game joystick control;
• high cost of games and their media;
• insufficient number of interesting and varied games;
• consoles were made only for gamers, not for the whole family.

Sony took all this into account when creating a new console: the low price of the set-top box itself and games for it, the presence of a regular CD drive, a huge number of games, ease of use - the set-top box has become a multimedia center for the whole family.

Thanks to the favorable start-up conditions and the analysis of other people's failures, Sony was a tremendous success, and even Bill Gates later admitted this fact to the leadership of the Japanese company.

Failure is also success if we learn from it.

Malcolm Forbes

Don't underestimate failure. If you focus only on success all the time, then you will simply miss a lot in the picture of what is happening. Look wider, analyze your own and others' mistakes, and don't be led by marketing. Communicate with those whose projects and endeavors have failed - believe me, they can tell you a lot.