Learning from failure & success is overrated

In Annie Duke’s Thinking In Bets book (thanks @keni for the idea!), she talks about decision-making skills from playing poker. Poker’s not all that different from entrepreneurship I feel. And “thinking in bets” is definitely how I relate to running a business, making products. It’s not called “a portfolio of small bets” for nothing!

One line in particular—about learning from success and failure—stood out:

“You’re not always right when things go your way; you’re not always wrong when they don’t.”

Mindblown.

Gosh I’m so wrong. Again.

You see, I’m kind of a personal growth geek. I love learning. I like improving myself. I enjoy reflecting on my progress. Above all, I love extracting lessons from successes, and especially failures.

I’m always asking: “What did I learn?”

Maybe that way of learning worked well in a predictable world in school, sports and later in work, where it’s easier to isolate and observe how your effort play out against the results you get. It’s easier to learn from success and failure.

But not so for entrepreneurship.

Because of the volatile, uncertain and complex and ambiguous nature of running a business, it’s not always possible to isolate and observe results from inputs accurately. Sometimes it just circumstantial, or plain dumb luck.

So in “You’re not always right when things go your way; you’re not always wrong when they don’t.”, when I succeeded, the things I did aren’t necessarily the right things. That I can understand, due to factors like luck. But what’s more mindblowing was realising that when I failed, the things I did aren’t necessarily the wrong things!

Learning from failure (or success) isn’t always as helpful as we thought!

If we shouldn’t emulate success stories of other entrepreneurs because we can’t isolate the factors that led to success, then we certainly shouldn’t read too much into failures.

Learning from both success and failure are overrated.

What should I do then?

• Don’t form lessons and learnings. Form hypotheses. and experiments. Don’t take anything as solid truth until I’ve acted on and applied it, and that it’s shown to be replicable and reliable.
• Even things that I tried, worked, and repeatable on one of my products might not be useful on another product I run. Same person, but different product, different business context. So always be ready to review.
• See lessons as suggestions, learning from the successes/failures of others as brainstorming ideas to try, not new rules to follow.
• It’s tempting to extract new rules to follow when doing post-mortem reviews from failures. DON’T. It’s still ok to do reviews. But be highly suspicious of anything resembling a new rule. Form my next hypothesis instead.

Above all, aim to be your own person.