EP 13: ON FAILURE PART 1 : FAIL FAST, FAIL OFTEN : RYAN BABINEAUX

Bounce! Conversations with Larry Weeks

This is part one of a two part series on the subject of failure. On this episode we talk with Ryan Babineaux the author of “Fail Fast, Fail Often” on the importance of making mistakes and learning from them to discover what works and more importantly - what makes you happy.

What if your biggest mistake is that you're not making enough mistakes?

I don't mean in the sense of purposely screwing things up. We are not advocating recklessness nor do we want to glorify failure directly - we are glorifying effort, risk, courage and for good measure let’s tack on the end of Teddy's famous poem

"...and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Yeah, that.

Ryan has a Ph.D in Educational Psychology from Stanford University and an M.Ed in Psychology and Human Development from Harvard. He is the co-creator of the popular Stanford course “Fail Fast, Fail Often,” and in his best selling book of the same name, discovered after working with thousands of people, that those who were successful seemed to have had less fear of mistakes.

They spent less time planning and more time acting. They got out into the world, tried new things, made mistakes but in doing so, benefited from unexpected experiences and opportunities.

The strategy is to overcome your fear of losing so that you will increase your at bats for winning by sheer volume of effort and what you learn from that effort. You use that to adjust till you find what works and all the while, gain experience and build resilience.

Think of this podcast as a course in a specific kind of courage. Courage to take more risk, courage to try.

Ryan says somewhere on the other side of failure is the success you seek, but it's on the other side so walk through it.

What if your goal was to fail, and fail a lot? For a second just forget about the results, think of how many NEW things you would actually start. How many HARD things you would attempt since we flipped failure from avoidance to be the actual goal. The only way to fail a lot is to start a lot of things, try a lot of things.

On the podcast we talk about all of this and much more.

Give it a listen.