Failure: The Milestones to Success

 When you are traveling down the road toward your calling, the pathway might not be as straight as you'd expect. In fact, it might not be very straight at all.

In Lean Startup, Eric Reis characterizes the path that a startup company takes as primarily a learning journey. Whatever initial funding your startup has defines its "runway": how long you have to get your company airborne and paying for its own existence. But you progress down the runway is not fixed. It's not just the rate at which your company is burning through its capital. Its how fast it's learning about the value it's trying to deliver and the market that it's trying to serve. The sooner you find that product-market fit and generate positive cash flow, the sooner your company can pull back on the stick and get the wheels off the runway. Reis calls that learning process the "build-measure-learn" cycle, and periodically, a startup has to reach a decision point, a crossroad where it chooses to pivot or persevere.

The same is true for finding your calling. You are on a learning journey. The sooner that you find a way to live your passion and make it sustainable, the sooner you can pull back on the stick and get the wheels off the runway. That learning journey is very much like build-measure-learn.

You conduct experiments. You try something and see if it works to get you closer to your calling. If it does, you learned something. But if it doesn't, you've still learned something.

WHEN (not if) you fail, you've learned how not to do it. And that is valuable information. As Thomas Edison said when trying to invent the lightbulb, "I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways it will not work." Negative experimental results are still useful results. Any given failure is but a milestone on the path to learning.

Now, what you fail at can be significant. Design your experiments to learn fastest at the least cost. Be frugal. Build your experiments to give you the greatest learning for your experimental dollar (or whatever cost metric you want to define: time, favors requested or cashed in, etc.). The economics of your experimental endeavors is a subtle art form to talk about another day.

So, as you get off your butt and move toward your calling (or where you think you'll find your calling), put on your lab coat and be scientific about it. Craft an experiment that will tell you whether this direction is getting you closer to your calling or farther away from it.

Note, too, that your calling might be best approached by a circuitous path. You might have to navigate away from your calling to approach it from the other side. But that's a topic for another blog post.