Fail big

I write a lot about failure. About getting past it. About moving beyond having bad ideas. About not being afraid to do it.

This is because I believe that your capacity to fail is directly proportional to your capacity to succeed.

Fail big. Embrace it.

I'll leave you with this gem from the business section of Failure Magazine. This is from an interview with the authors of Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years. It's a story about Tom Watson Jr, who led IBM in its glory days. Clearly, he saw the value in failure.

There was an IBM employee in the early 1960s who had run a business unit that lost 10 million dollars. Watson called him in to headquarters. The guy walked into Watson’s office kind of weak-kneed. Watson said, “Do you know why I called you here?” He said, “I assume you called me here to fire me.” Watson said, “Fire you? Hell, I just spent 10 million dollars educating you. I just wanted to be sure you learned the right lessons.”