Failure is not feeback

How often have you heard someone, in their best attempt at a profound recitation, tell you to simply think of failure as feedback? Maybe I've exposed myself to this more than most, but at this point it has lost any value it once had.

Here are the problems with this mindset shift. If you really want to shift to a feedback mindset, you'll struggle to do so by identifying failures and trying to rebrand them. You need to start from the root. That is, shift to an experimental mindset. There is no such thing as a failed experiment. Every outcome is potentially valuable.

If you get into the habit of running experiments, you never have to reframe failure. All you have to do is observe the results and adjust accordingly.

Here's another problem: the attempt to reframe failure (negative) as feedback ignores the fact that a great deal of feedback is also undesirable and unpleasant. Burning your hand on a hot stove is feedback. Being told by your wife that she wants a divorce because you have been taking her for granted is feedback. Tearing a muscle yourself because you were ego lifting is feedback. Feedback isn't necessarily more desirable than failure.

So here's another option--one that shifts the valence of failure to distinctly positive: failure is an investment.

Josh Waitzkin--chess grand master, push hands world champion, BJJ black belt, and elite performance coach--argues for investing heavily in failure throughout the learning process. Try things that you don't think will work just to check whether they might. Do thinks you know won't work to find out why they don't.

Failure can be an investment because this reframe acknowledges that, as with any investment, failure involves trading discomfort in the present for the possibility of greater success in the future.

Even failures from which you aren't able to extract any lessons can qualify since committing to the big changes often requires a certain amount of frustration. That is, we need to fail enough to get fed up.

In this sense, the non-instructive, painful failures may, in time, prove to be the highest return investments.

So, whatever change it is you are contemplating--the one that fear of failure has kept you from attempting--design an experiment that will leave you with either the result you want or a downpayment on that result.

What will your next experiment be?