Failures teach you what doesn’t work, success teaches you what works.

I’ve lived by this fairly Stoic maxim for the last 5 years. It doesn’t let failure get to you, nor does it let success get to your head. But all of this is easier said than done.

We believe that failures are related mostly to our careers. Indeed, those are the ones that are highlighted and discussed the most. 

But the harder to handle failures happen in your health and relationships

2015’s summer was a dark one for me. In between a gruelling summer internship, I developed a very aggressive allergy. It made it impossible for me to function effectively. 

The difficulties of a hard job only made it worse. 

I was used to thinking that failures happened at work only. After this incident, I began to realize the importance of your health and how it affected you.

It took me a few years to get back to good health. Years in college of having not taken care of food, sleep and exercise had gotten to me. 

I had learned what did not work for my health. 

I have had so many failures in my career, relationships and health that I have lost count. I wouldn’t bother to go on and list them as you can’t really learn from my failures. 

The only thing it will do is make you think “oh, he too fails so much” and “oh wow, look how far he has come with these failures”. It will just make me look very good. 

What I want to share is things I learned by failing.

Failures do teach you what doesn’t work. Some failures are quite small, like choosing the wrong road and getting stuck in a traffic jam. Some failures are quite big, like a broken marriage. 

In each case, you can learn something from the failure. 

I treat almost every failure in this objective, cold-hearted way. I do a post-mortem of the failure. I list the positives and negatives of each failure. I almost always learn something about myself, the world and how I interact with the world. 

Learning from failures compounds into learning

Failure is a topic itself has compounded so much, that I can share failure quotes on the top of my head, such as “Failures are stepping stones to success”

Indeed, failures help you do better to eventually succeed. But an observation I’ve made is that very few new attempts actually work, most don’t.

More things will fail in your life than they will succeed. Now in this paradigm of abundant failure and scant success, how do you even live peacefully?

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, as they say. This is repeated so often that it feels like well-meaning BS. But there is a grain of truth.

You should fail where you could take the shock of failure if it is in your control. As in the case of my health, I am a young guy who can take that shock. While I didn’t plan the failure, it happened at a time I could handle it. 

In the same spirit, fail where you can afford to fail. 

Jeff Bezos says “'If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle”. Indeed, when you have a $350Bn balance sheet that is twice the size of a country, you can afford billions of dollars of failure. 

Similarly, if I can write a 10 lakh personal investment into a company, it doesn’t move the needle personally if it fails. This failure amount will eventually grow, and so will my size of failures. 

I’ve rarely seen founders succeed when they couldn’t afford to fail. You can’t keep looking over your shoulder while the business is on fire, good or bad. 

Most have started up after building a good enough savings base for a 6-12 month runway. Many even have family wealth they can rely upon.

We do hear stories that “I was on the road, and this was my last hope” but those cases are rare in even the successes we see. Most successes are built on failures that were affordable. 

It’s also why I advocate so strongly on at least completing your education before starting up. It helps you afford failure, purely from an economic perspective. 

Build enough of a base to be able to fail, even spectacularly. The larger your cushion, the greater your opportunity to fail big. 

Failure is good and it helps you get better. Fail fast, and fail often. 

But fail when you can afford to, and learn in the process.