So let's talk about the F word--
no, this is a PG-13 course,
so we'll stay within those parameters.
But we'll talk a bit about failure,
which is a word that often most of us
don't like to hear.
But what if we accepted failure as a
critical part of the learning process,
as a part of the creative process?
Think of the first time you ever
picked a musical instrument.
I remember the very first time
that I picked up my guitar,
and I thought I was going
to sound just like The Edge
playing Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
But I did not-- I sucked.
But when you learn a
musical instrument, you
accept failure as a critical
part of the learning process.
Now, what if we applied
that very concept
on this mindset of
entrepreneurialism, if you will?
What if you accepted failure not
as something to run away from,
but something to be embraced?
When you've failed, people
think about that as a low point.
But I think that-- you said in
music, failure is a known thing.
It's part of the way up.
And I think it's part of
the way up on everything--
entrepreneurship, relationships.
I think that we have this desire
for a going-forward look at life.
That parents might
say, what's your plan?
My plan is to go to college.
And I'm going to get this degree.
And then I'm going to
work in this industry,
I'm going to blah, blah, blah.
It's like, oh, great.
Now you've got this forward path.
When in reality, life
doesn't work that way at all.
And you end up with a lot of
crap that you have to deal with.
But I believe that our
engine runs on what's wrong.
So if you don't have failure,
and you didn't have pain,
the freakin' engine wouldn't be on.
From a personal experience, I know
when I first started my company--
when I went out there looking to raise
money from investors-- I got rejections
from just about everyone.
But in many ways, that rejection
led me down the right path.
I ended up starting the company
with just my savings, which
led me to making a
series of decisions that
ended up proving what made the
company successful in the long term.
So in many ways, failure tends
to point you in the direction
that you ought to be
going in the first place.
It tends to unearth and expose the
true path that you need to be taking.
Innovation is generally
about creating things
that have never been created before.
So I've got this very
strong principle around here
that we should be failing
at least 95% of the time.
In large corporations, people are
taught that you shouldn't really
stick your head above the clouds,
or else is going to get lopped off.
Because if you fail too many times,
people are going to point their finger
and say, hey, he's not
done anything good,
or she's not done anything
good in a long period of time.
Whereas, in innovation, in a startup
company, it's the total opposite.
If you fail, you learn and you adjust.
That's success.
There are some fun analogies, too, of
this process of iteration and failure
as one of the only ways to solve
important engineering challenges.
So there was a lot of talk early on
in the days of artificial intelligence
of how could we get a machine to
really understand how the world works
and to be genuinely
intelligent in the world?
Well the first really
well-known commercial product
that came out of the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Lab
was a damn vacuum cleanet--
a Roomba vacuum cleaner.
And they got it to
work not by loading it
with all the intelligence of what every
living room in the world looks like,
or where all the dust is on the floor.
They gave it a few simple rules.
They said, why don't you just go spin
around out there see what happens?
And if you hit a leg of furniture, just
back up and move in another direction.
They taught it enough to know when it
was about to go down a flight of steps,
and then taught it to back
up when it reached that.
That was a simple set
of iterative rules that
could be engineered into
a crude machine-- which,
if that machine works hard
enough and long enough,
it will act as though it
knew what it was doing.
Similar to the entrepreneur who we
claim, oh, he had a plan all along.
He knew exactly what the
company was going to do.
That machine didn't know where
the dirt was when it started,
but it had enough simple
rules of adaptability
that it was able to actually get all
the dirt up, as though it had a plan.
In order to create some of the
greatest engineering accomplishments
that we know, you have
to embrace a method
of relating to the world in
which failure is an option.
If you fundamentally shift your
attitude about what failure is,
and what it means, and the
signals that it sends you,
then you tend to look at
it as something that's
an inevitable part of embarking on
a new adventure, which is ultimately
what entrepreneurship really means--
rather than it being a big red stop
sign that stops us dead in our tracks.
