The beauty of failing fast

Every time we look at successful people, we assume they got lucky.

Behind that luck are usually hundreds of quiet attempts nobody saw. Drafts that got deleted. Pitches that got ignored. Products that never shipped.

I know an engineer who failed the same kind of interview four times in a row.

• First time, he froze and couldn't speak clearly.
• Second time, he overexplained and ran out of time.
• Third time, he stayed quiet and the interviewer thought he wasn't trying.
• Fourth time, he fixed all three and got the offer.

He wasn't the same candidate who walked in the first time. He was built out of three specific failures.

That's the beauty of failure. It's not the opposite of progress. People don't get good because they avoid mistakes. They get good because they showed the courage to commit — one majority does not even try with the fear of getting failed or criticised.

Every failed attempt removes one wrong path from your journey. It tells you, this approach doesn't work, and that's real information. You're not back at zero. You've just narrowed the field.

The fastest way to succeed is often to fail fast.

Apply to the role. Sit in the interview. Don't wait around for the version of yourself that's ready enough, because that version only gets built by showing up unready first. If it doesn't work, learn from it, adjust, and go again.

Same applies to happiness, the prime purpose of life is to stay happy — if a certain aspect of life isn't giving you happiness/satisfaction, something else will.

Fail as many times as you need to. Just don't fail the same way twice. Because the goal was never to skip the failing.

It was to fail your way into something that finally works.