‘I didn’t fail a thousand times, I
learned a thousand ways not to do
something’
bad’. Instead, say ‘no,
wait a minute, by trying
something and failing I
can now learn something that I couldn’t
have learned if I’d succeeded, perhaps’.
Use Thomas Edison. In
the United States we
use Thomas Edison.
He tried literally thousands of materials in
one of the inventions
he was working on, and
he failed thousands of
times. It was the wrong
material, it was the
wrong example. But he
persevered, and there’s
a famous quote of his
that goes: ‘I didn’t
fail a thousand times,
I learned a thousand
20
ways not to do something’.
So intelligent fast failure is noticing that I’m
not happy that I failed,
but not thinking there
must be something
wrong with me because
of it; rather, focusing
on what I learned from
that failure, because
that learning thing is
what I’m going to walk
away with. I’m not going
to walk away with the