VC Ed Sim: "Never give up but move on quickly"

The title is from a 2011 post from Ed's blog Beyond VC. At first (and maybe second) glance this is a paradox. At the heart of this paradox is one of the deeper secrets for learning from mistakes. Let's deconstruct it:

"Never give up..." This is a mantra repeated over and over again on this site, including Garr Reynolds's "Fall down 7 times, get up 8" and Angela Duckworth's discussions of grit. Persistence is essential to power past stumbles, failures, criticism, ridicule - all conditions that come before worthwhile successes.

...but move on quickly" - this refers to the ability to maturely sniff out a situation that is heading for failure, and not devote endless work cycles to trying to pull a success from the jaws of failure. Overall success requires diagnosing, with evidence, counsel and your own intuition, the smaller failures that come up along the way, and shifting your approach quickly after the diagnosis comes in.

"Never give up but move on quickly" is one of the Scylla-Charybdis balancing acts (per Albert Wenger) necessary to be a good entrepreneur or really senior leader of any kind.

"Mistakes On Purpose" workshop

For those who are intrigued by the subject matter on this site, you may be interested in the "Mistakes On Purpose" workshop by Laurie Rosenwald, which she provides to companies and educational organizations. More info here.

Teacher's mistake: not including all the children in the school performance

This is a story from my aunt Catherine McShane. This was one of my first interviews for The Mistake Bank in 2007, but I never posted the video due to its poor quality (camera and cinematographer not so great). I have always liked this story and it fits perfectly in our Education section.

In the 1950s I was teaching for the first time. I taught in California, and then we didn't have a kindergarten in most places. The children I got had not been to kindergarten. And so it was new for them as it was for me. As we went along, we kind of grew together.

I had 60 children in first grade. One of the activities we did with the children was an end of year program for the parents. This one year the children were doing a dance. They were all involved - all 60. But somewhere along the way - because some of them were so immature - I decided not to include all of them in the final performance.

We had the dance; parents enjoyed it. However, when the dance was over, I had one parent come up to me. He said, "You did not allow my son to dance. I came all the way from Chicago to take his picture."

Now I see the difference in not allowing all the children to participate, whether they could dance or not. It was a poor decision. And I certainly learned a lot from that. I have now retired, but I still remember this clearly. It's very important to get the approval of parents and teachers and classmates, and agree that everybody gets involved.

Entrepreneurs to Cornell Tech students: "It's a miracle if a startup gets off the ground"

From the New York Times profile of Cornell NYC Tech, a new university with an introductory class of eight students. The school, which is building a new campus on Roosevelt Island off Manhattan, focuses on combining research and practical work, saying that "business, technology and real-world experience are baked into the coursework."

Not long ago, three young high-tech entrepreneurs sat with the students, talking about failure. They talked about questionable technical, financial or personnel decisions in start-up businesses they had created or worked in, about companies they had seen disintegrate, and about detours into projects they later discarded.

A question was asked about Andrew Mason, co-founder of Groupon, who had been fired a day earlier as the company’s chief executive.

“We should all be so lucky as to build a company that the investors care enough about to fire us,” Tim Novikoff, the C.E.O. of a small company making mobile phone software, said with a wave of his arm around the table, prompting laughter from the students and knowing nods from the Cornell Tech staff. A rail-thin man with the deep-set eyes of someone who could use a little more sleep, Mr. Novikoff is in his early 30s, making him the oldest of the three visitors.

“It’s a miracle if a start-up gets off the ground,” he said. “The last six months I’ve had no income, I have no health insurance. But I got to fly out to a C.E.O. conference and talk with Ashton Kutcher about mobile video for 10 minutes.”

The visitors urged the students to take risks but to expect, at least at first, a precarious existence, riddled with setbacks, that will require obsessiveness and a thick skin — and they made it sound like the grandest of adventures.

Seth Godin: early failure is "merely a step along the way"

Seth Godin posted on his blog about his first public speaking experience, a failure:

Forty years ago today was my first bout of speaking in front of an audience. (And as I remember it, I approached it as a fight, not an opportunity.) I was distracted, nervous and not particularly well received.

It was an epic fail. Friends and relatives agreed that I wasn't engaged or engaging, certainly a performance not to be repeated.

I ignored the part about not repeating it, but I definitely learned some valuable lessons about confidence and engagement.

Just about anything worth doing is worth doing better, which means, of course, that (at least at first) there will be failure. That's not a problem (in the long run), it's merely a step along the way.

This reminds me of the quote from Indiana University's Dean Shepherd: "failure is not the opposite of success."

[Hat tip Elizabeth Sosnow.]

#TMOxfail - teachers learning from things that didn't work

TeachMeet, a UK-based meetup organization focused on education, announced #TMOxfail, a gathering on July 11 in Oxford, England:

Having run a couple of conventional 'sharing best practice' TeachMeets, we'd like to add a different twist to this one. You are invited to come along to present and share experiences of, rather than what that worked well, activities, lessons, approaches or strategies which you tried, but which didn't work out so well! Why would anyone want to do that? Well, #TMOxfail is offered in the belief that:

- we learn as much, probably more, from reflecting on failure as we do by focusing on success
- sharing best practice can be useful and inspiring; so can the honesty and openness which comes from talking about when things go wrong
- as teachers, we can be too quick to feel bad when things go wrong - by discussing these things openly, we can develop a 'growth mindset' culture in which it's OK to fail, as long as we reflect, renew and build again

We are looking for either 2 minute (nano) presentations, or 7 minute (micro) presentations in which you might talk about:
- An activity, lesson, approach or strategy that you tried and what you were hoping for
- What happened in reality and what you think went wrong
- What you learnt from the experience, and how you would / did do it differently next time

[Note the reference to Carol Dweck's work on the "growth mindset."]

I wish the #TMOxfail folks all success in their venture. I wonder if they might be willing to post some of their presentations and share their stories here?

Quick change of subject: let me take this opportunity to point out a new feature. Now that there are nearly 500 posts on the site, navigation for new readers is an issue. So, I've created a handful of key categories (listed on the right-hand column), which collect posts that relate to that category. If you are interested in learning more about the role of failure and mistakes in startups, click that link. You will be presented with a much smaller set of posts, all of which are related to startups.

Not coincidentally, one of these key categories is Education :)

[Hat tip Tim Harford]

Physics professor learns the standard way of teaching didn't work - "My teaching caused my students to fail!"

Garr Reynolds, on his Presentation Zen blog, discusses Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur's evolution from straight-up college lecturer to accomplished teacher and authority on student peer learning. Garr's post goes into many facets of Mazur's story, but I want to focus here on just one part - Mazur's taking accountability for his students' failure to learn:

"I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material," says Mazur. "Who was to blame? The students? The material?" In this presentation below from 2009 entitled "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer," Mazur explains how he came to the conclusion that "It was my teaching that caused students to fail!" If you have the time I recommend that you watch the entire presentation(over one hour in length). However, there is a rough edit of the same presentation that is still fairly good at getting Mazur's key points across in just 18 minutes.Watch the abridged version here on Youtube.



Mazur's sense of agency is notable, especially in education, where failures are easily blamed on students, parents or adminstrators, but the single area that can make all the difference is the approach and methods of a skilled, committed teacher.

Self-compassion is more important to success than self-esteem

Heidi Grant Halvorson, writing for the HBR Blog Network, asserts that self-esteem, rather than being a useful tool for enabling high performance, may instead be destructive.

Rather, the idea of self-compassion, forgiving yourself for mistakes and failures, is more beneficial, and may drive success. Writes Halvorson:

A growing body of research, including new studies by Berkeley's Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, suggest that self-compassion, rather than self-esteem, may be the key to unlocking your true potential for greatness.

Now, I know that some of you are already skeptical about a term like "self-compassion." But this is a scientific, data-driven argument — not feel-good pop psychology. So hang in there and keep an open mind.

Self-compassion is a willingness to look at your own mistakes and shortcomings with kindness and understanding — it's embracing the fact that to err is indeed human. When you are self-compassionate in the face of difficulty, you neither judge yourself harshly, nor feel the need to defensively focus on all your awesome qualities to protect your ego. It's not surprising that self-compassion leads, as many studies show, to higher levels of personal well-being, optimism and happiness, and to less anxiety and depression.

Self-compassion is a core ingredient of grit, which you've read about here in the past. Self-compassion makes it safer to admit error and share stories of mistakes, which has the powerful benefit of raising the knowledge of an entire team or company.

Sharing stories about mistakes and failure is another way to enable self-compassion. It helps us understand we are not alone in stumbling from time to time. That's one of the purposes of this blog and of the Mistake Bank book, currently in process.

Sigourney Weaver shows her grit: "It's a good thing for me that Yale was so mean"

In a recent interview on NPR's Fresh Air, actress Sigourney Weaver described how she began acting. In the story, she discussed her discouraging experience at Yale Drama School. Weaver was clearly undeterred by the negative feedback; she has fashioned a stellar 30+ year career. More than that, she took that lesson and established a theater to provide a better environment for young actors - demonstrating resilience, grit and a long memory.

DAVIES: So what took you into acting?

WEAVER: Well, when I was at college I was an English major and on the side I did a lot of very irreverent, crazy theater with a wonderful group called The Company. We had a kind of covered wagon. We used to do commedia dell'arte all over the San Francisco Bay area. We did "King Lear." We did "Hamlet." We did, you know, we were fearless and we had nothing to do with any drama department. And when it came time for me to leave college - which was a scary moment - I quickly applied to drama schools, kind of as a lark, and I got in. Now...

DAVIES: To Yale.

WEAVER: ...I actually did these - yeah. To all of them, actually. Then I had a miserable time at Yale where they really were discouraging.

DAVIES: Hmm. In what way?

WEAVER: They told me I had no talent and I'd never get anywhere. You know, I am not alone. So many art schools believe that they need to tear down young people. They consider it a sort of rite of passage to kind of roll - steamroll you and crush you into the dust. And so that's why helped found The Flea Theater here in New York where we have currently, we have 90 young actors, brilliant, wonderful young actors. Very diverse. We just got a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. But so actually, it's a good thing it happened to me that Yale was so mean, because now I've been part of something that's created an alternative to drama school, which, as was always the case in so many businesses, you come into the theater and you learn by doing and it's an intergenerational thing. And I work at The Flea and we all inspire each other.

Other references to the value of grit to overcome obstacles and setbacks here.

"Failure is not the opposite of success"

This quote is from Dean Shepherd's book, "From Lemons to Lemonade: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Success Out of Your Mistakes." Shepherd is a professor at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and studies decisionmaking and cognition, focusing on learning from experimentation and failure.

Failure is not the opposite of success. Failure at specific projects occurs on the way to overall success - success in kindergarten, school, career, and life. The key is to learn and keep trying.

True Grit #2 - English girls' school tries a "failure week"

According to the BBC, the Wimbledon High School near London will hold a "failure week" in February to teach its high-performing students that it's better to try new things and fail at them than to play it safe and try to sidestep situations where failure is possible.

The headmistress, Heather Hanbury, said she wanted to show "it is completely acceptable and completely normal not to succeed at times in life."...

There will be workshops, assemblies, and activities for the girls, with parents and tutors joining in with tales of their own failures.

There will be YouTube clips of famous and successful people who have failed along the way and moved on.

The emphasis will be discussions on the merits of failure and on the negative side of trying too hard not to fail.

This is a perfect time to teach that learning and development are more important than 100% grades. My high school experience was prime time for the pursuit of grades rather than learning, which I find really annoying in hindsight (in other words, that was a mistake :).

The headmistress' thinking is reminiscent of the importance of "grit" - the ability to bounce back from failure promoted by the University of Pennsylvania's Angela Duckworth. I hope headmistress Hanbury lets the girls know that mistakes can open up new vistas and new opportunities, worlds of possibility, rather than the closet of "perfection or nothing."

NB: The Failure Week was held from February 6-10 and here are some of the learnings from it. My favorite quote: "We just lost in debating this week – we’ve been joking: is that what it’s about??"

If by "it" you mean developing a sense of humor around your fallibility, the answer is yes--that's what it's about.

[Hat tip to @brainology]

"True Grit" - the importance of learning how to overcome setbacks

Paul Tough of The New York Times Magazine profiled private-school headmaster Dominic Randolph and his focus on instilling character into his students, in addition to the typical focus on academics and extracurriculars. Central to his efforts is a belief that students need to overcome setbacks - to try and fail at things - to develop character. Tough writes:

When I asked Randolph to explain just what he thought Riverdale students were missing out on, he told me the story of his own scholastic career. He did well in boarding school and was admitted to Harvard, but when he got to college, he felt lost, out of step with the power-tie careerism of the Reagan ’80s. After two years at Harvard, Randolph left for a year to work in a low-paying manual job, as a carpenter’s helper, trying to find himself. After college, he moved for a couple of years to Italy, where he worked odd jobs and studied opera. It was an uncertain and unsettled time in his life, filled with plenty of failed experiments and setbacks and struggles. Looking back on his life, though, Randolph says that the character strengths that enabled him to achieve the success that he has were not built in his years at Harvard or at the boarding schools he attended; they came out of those years of trial and error, of taking chances and living without a safety net. And it is precisely those kinds of experiences that he worries that his students aren’t having.

“The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”

And one of the scholars who have influenced Randolph's thinking, Penn's Angela Duckworth, emphasizes that struggle is essential to success:

“The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also the students themselves,” she wrote. “Here’s why: learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying — but it is also often daunting, exhausting and sometimes discouraging. . . . To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.”

Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s. But while self-control seemed to be a critical ingredient in attaining basic success, Duckworth came to feel it wasn’t as relevant when it came to outstanding achievement. People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit."

The idea of "grit" as a character trait vital to success is related to Carol Dweck's research showing the value of a learning versus a fixed mindset. To Dweck, successful learners see a failure as an opportunity to learn and improve, not a referendum on one's innate ability.

Some learn grit later in life. Others learn it early (Randolph is trying to teach it to his students). But in any event, if you don't learn it sooner or later, it's hard to be truly successful.

For more on grit, here's a TED Talk from Angela Duckworth:

Teacher Diana Laufenberg - "Telling kids to never be wrong doesn't allow them to learn"

Another great TED talk on learning from mistakes. Diana Laufenberg, an educator, points out that school was once a place to go to get information, but now that information is available anywhere via the internet, schools need a new mission. She votes for experiential learning - seeing for oneself, drawing one's own conclusions and learning by dialoguing with others about their different conclusions.

And she states that such an educational mission is at odds with the culture of A+/100% standards and multiple choice testing. (If you don't believe her, scrutinize an elementary student's reading comprehension assignments and the so-called "right" answers that are expected.)