Success is a poor teacher

Success is often a poor teacher. 

I have been using this phrase for a while now, but I admit I’m not sure who first popularized it. 

I was talking to a serial, founder-operator last week and asked him this question:

If you graphed your mistakes vs the quality of the learning from those mistakes - and your successes vs that quality learning? How do you think the two would compare?  

Let’s say the learning in each case had to (in the end) directly improve shareholder value. And let’s also admit this was an unscientific analysis and prone to some conformational bias.  The successes were things like attracting a great sounding hire, winning a huge deal in a new market, raising a big round etc. Failures were things like churning a big client, losing an important team member, messing up a product launch and so on.  We each did and analysis drawn from our respective histories.

After about two hours of painful self-examination and some pareto analysis, the total value of the learning from the successes lost by a long shot.  Also worth noting, the successes ultimately lead to failures about 1/2 of the time. In a sense, the value of those particular successes were short lived. Yet failures ultimately lead to definitive successes about 2/3 of the time.  So the negative effect most failures was eventually erased. 

Were failures somehow disproportionately adding to shareholder value better than success? 

We revere leaders who have had big successes and seemingly no failures. I think this is mostly wrong.  I like to hear about the messy details, the hard decisions, the dark moments - that tells me more about the leader and their business. 

Culturally, many companies demand a non-stop parade of success or staff start to worry and become demoralized. I get how that is.  But the value of well understood error is huge from a company building perspective.  So, why not treat a mistake as a valuable asset? Why not celebrate a good mistake as much as a good win? 

I always wanted to install a Mistake Bell.  A way to celebrate a new failure and recognize the clarity that it can bring to a business.