Learning From Failure – Part III

Like it or not, failure is a part of any exploratory process. Jimmy Buffett may have been half-joking when he said that “even the best navigators don’t know for sure where they’re going until they get there,” but there is a grain of truth in that statement. And if you change “navigators” to explorers, inventors, entrepreneurs, or adventurers in creative ventures or life, the statement is 100% true.
Anyone setting out across uncharted territory can’t know what they will encounter along the way, or where they will eventually end up—even if they have a clear direction or goal at the start. Which is why a central key to success, for any explorer, is learning to recognize wrong turns or mistakes, learn from them, and adjust course accordingly.  (Or, “navigate, evaluate, and innovate,” as I’ve put it in talks I’ve given on the subject.)
That kind of process is what business writer Evan Schwartz would call “failure iteration”— failures that lead you to change your approach or design, producing another iteration. But not all failures fit into that category. In a piece called “What Steve Wozniak Learned From Failure” that Schwartz wrote for the Harvard Business Review a while back (but which I just stumbled across this week), he acknowledges that not all failures are alike. Most, if you pay attention to what they’re telling you, can be educational. But sometimes, Schwartz admitted, a failure “doesn’t seem to tell you anything.”
I had to laugh at that last one, because I remember telling friends on more than one occasion, as I struggled with various setbacks, “You know, I haven’t figured out yet whether I get to learn something from this, or if I just get to feel bad for a while.”
But the piece, which was primarily a profile of Steve Wozniak (who co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs), is a thought-provoking study on success, failure, and the unpredictability of life over the long haul.
Wozniak was a genius at innovation and failure iteration, when it came to engineering and computer design. His landmark Apple II was the last computer designed by a single person. And yet, his next venture after Apple, Cloud Nine, was a failure. And somewhere in that failure, he lost … well, at least his confidence in his ability to invent successfully, if not the actual ability itself. Schwartz quotes Wozniak as saying, right after Cloud Nine failed, “It gets to the point where you can’t tell where the inventiveness was lost.”
Wozniak largely withdrew from inventing for the better part of 15 years, according to Schwartz, concentrating instead on teaching computer graphics to kids. In 2002, he founded another company called Wheels of Zeus (WoZ), which focused on low-cost GPS trackers. When Schwartz wrote the Harvard piece, WoZ seemed like a great second act in the making. But the company closed down a couple of years later. Wozniak is still involved in a number of ventures, companies, and activities, including a number of philanthropic endeavors … but nothing he’s done since has had success on anywhere near the scale of his Apple days. That doesn’t mean Wozniak is unhappy, or that he doesn’t still invent and innovate amazing things. I’d actually be curious to know how he feels about it all now.
But it seems to me that his story, at least as Schwartz presents it, offers several thoughts worth pondering. First is the role that confidence plays in the success of anyone pursuing an uncharted course. My brother-in-law is a sculptor and an artist (www.harrymcdaniel.com) and I’m constantly amazed at his ability to come up with novel and modernistic sculpture ideas and brazenly put them out into the world for judgment. In a sense, every entrepreneur does the same thing. But unlike an entrepreneur developing a product like a personal computer or universal remote, you can’t make a logical case for the market demand of a particular modern sculpture. It’s a very personal vision, with no “utility” at all. So to commit the resources to create it, you have to have an astounding level of confidence that your vision will resonate with enough people to make it commercially viable. (Or you have to be independently wealthy, which few artists are.)
Where do people get that confidence, and what happens if and when it goes away?
Second … for all the effort artists and entrepreneurs tend put into a vision of “the thing” that will insure our future success (the best-selling novel, the hit invention, the next Google company idea, the Academy-Award-winning movie) … Steve Wozniak is a sobering reminder that life is a marathon, not a sprint. Or not even a marathon, because you never get to take a deep breath and say “Ah. There. I’ve crossed the finish line. I’m good, now.”  Life is, instead, a never-ending adventure—more akin to a never-ending video game where even great success merely adds some strength that your character can apply to the next maze and challenge along the way.
What all of that means, I’m not sure. But reading Schwartz’s piece, it occurred to me that learning from failure has two important dimensions. The first is learning from failure itself, in the sense that it can lead to better iterations, ideas, or directions, and therefore increase your chances of success down the line. But the second dimension is learning to cope with the fact of failure itself. Because … especially if you’re trying new or creative ventures, or charting your own course as opposed to following a “safer” path through life … failure will be part of your story. And learning to cope with that fact well will make you a more complete, healthy, and stronger human being going forward, no matter where you go after that.