Our relationship with success and failure is complex. The pressures of life to succeed are many, the fear of failure great; but history teaches us that failure is the only pathway to success, it’s why we build null hypothesis, not hypothesis, in order to maintain integrity of the experiment and eliminate bias. It’s why we run experiments, to find failure, to find the boundaries of our current knowledge and capability.
When acknowledged for its power, failure becomes the fuel for the trajectory of life, our understanding of it and our place within it. Embracing our failures is the only pathway to success because inside every failure is a learning if we have the courage to learn. Failure never fails to give you an honest answer unlike success which masquerades in our ego and so is rarely honest and bound by the interdependence of many other people’s efforts and coincidences.
Failure is the gateway beyond our current boundaries and limitations, shining a light on them, the path ahead, the opportunities for growth.
Moroku’s vision is the creation of a platform that provides growth, learning and confidence in financial markets to millions of customers. The strategy is one of game theory to engage customers in the flow of learning and the celebration not only of success but more importantly in the learning, growth and development. To do this we need to identify and embrace failures as the gateway to growth through a never ending cycle of development
This is how everything is built. It’s how we built drones and Icarus learnt to fly. Every time we broke through, we first failed and then got excited, curious and learnt something. The art of game design within the financial services experience is to reignite the excitement of failure and growth .
If someone stumbles upon a strategy that beats the boss or even passes all the challenges, what have they learnt? Usually nothing. If they fail, get curious, understand, retry and succeed, what have they learnt? Much more. These are the moments we are most interested in, these are the Eureka moments, the moments of most excitement and cause for celebration and success. As an aunt, uncle, parent or grandparent who has watched a baby learn to walk, failing, learning and getting stronger, you understand how this cycle works and how perhaps it is the only way.
Many enterprises misunderstand failure, they fear it. The proof of this lies within HR systems where little if anything in their performance management regimes and culture reward failure. We have lost the fundamental power of failure in our pursuit of quick success. Hemingway noted how proud we are to wear our badges of success in public but so ill prepared to do the work of failure in private to get there. JFK, Morihei Ueshiba, William Whewell all spoke of this.
If we have the courage we can provide private places for customers to fail and learn, to prepare for success. Likewise within projects, only by failing, getting curious about those, learning and re-running can we innovate and create something special, if we have the willingness to persist.