Embracing Failure for Success

If you want to be successful, I would encourage you to grow

a tolerance for failure.

But the thing about failure is this:

if you fail often

enough,

you actually might become a failure,

and that's different than being successful.

And so the question is: how do you teach someone

how to fail, but fail quickly

and to change courses as soon as you know it's a dead end?

And the way to do that is we call it intellectual honesty.

Um, we assess on a pur- on a continuous

basis whether something makes sense or not, and if it's the wrong decision,

let's change our mind.

And you know, a lot of people say CEOs are always right, and

they never change their mind.

That doesn't make any sense at all to me, especially when it violates the

first principles of what we want the company to become, an

innovative company that invents amazing things,

that solves problems for

a world that it sometimes didn't even know it had.

Right? If you wanna do that, then you have to cultivate

that, um, uh, tolerance for risk-taking, and you have to then teach

people how to fail, but fail quickly and inexpensively.

And so innovation requires a little bit of experimentation.

Experimentation requires exploration. Exploration will result in failure.

Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you would never experiment, and if you

don't ever experiment, you would never innovate.

If you don't innovate, you don't succeed.

You'll just be a dweeb.

That's it.

Any other questions?