I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

– Thomas Edison

Life, to me, is a series of experiments. Achieving a goal is fun, but every finish line is really just the start of a new adventure. Most of my time is spent mixing together magic potions, blowing things up, breaking stuff, and failing my way forward until reality starts looking like what I had in mind.

Success is really just a checkpoint on a road graveled by mistakes. The only way to get what you want out of life is to screw up in so many different ways that you finally reveal the path to success. You need to know how to not just mess things up, but mess things up intelligently.

Managing Complexity

Intelligent failure begins by breaking a problem up into manageable pieces. The most instructive screwups are those that happen while working on a small, self-contained puzzle. I like to smallchunk problems along two different axes: time and scope.

These two variables go hand-in-hand. Setting a time constraint usually helps control the scope of a problem. For example, as I mentioned in How to Achieve Your Goals Faster, I gave myself a hard deadline of one month to get this site up and running. Had I not done that, I’m sure I’d still be “thinking about” doing it or I’d have lost myself down the rabbit hole of feeping creaturism.

A short timeframe helps you design for failure. If your plan for achieving a goal requires two years of work before you’ll even start to see results, your cost of failure is huge. Small mistakes accrue a compound interest. Left unchecked, they can easily magnify into massive blunders over time. Breaking up your personal growth strategy into shorter iterations allows you to fail quickly and integrate real world feedback early on.

Narrowing the scope of your goal allows your failures to be more precise. When you try to do too much at once and something goes wrong, it can be hard to narrow down the cause. The smaller the piece of a puzzle you try to solve, the better the feedback you get from your trials and errors.

To break up any goal into manageable pieces, and identify useful time and scope boundaries, ask yourself this: What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work? This approach is borrowed from a software development methodology called Extreme Programming, but it applies just as much to planning a trip around the world, learning a new language, or even getting a girlfriend.

Discovering Your Values

A value is something that is important to you. Some things are probably more important to you than other things, so your values tend to organize themselves in a hierarchy.

Having a strong sense of your hierarchy of values will help you channel your energy into important problems. I’d even say that if you don’t consciously identify and act upon your values, the best you can hope for is mediocrity. It doesn’t matter how good you look on paper, how proud your parents are of you, or how hot your girlfriend is–if you trade a more important value for a less important one, you will suffer. If you make really good money at the price of hating what you do for a living, it will gnaw at your soul. If you trade trust for good sex in your relationship, your peace of mind will implode.

Failure can teach you a lot about your values, if you know what to look for.

One of my recent “failures” was learning to play Go. I committed myself to 30 days of learning the game, no matter what, and I gave up after only a few days. The reason I gave up was simple: I had a values conflict. While the challenge and symphony of the game appealed greatly to me, it failed to respond to an even higher value of mine: creative self-expression. Being a good Go player obviously requires great skill and creativity, but it wasn’t a medium through which I could express a meaningful message to the world. There was something about spending a great deal of time on Go that just didn’t feel right. That feeling arose via a disconnect from the things which I considered most important.

A failure like this is a good chance to ask yourself: Why did I give up? In many cases, the underlying reason is that your values hierarchy is out of whack, and you gave up because the pursuit lacked appeal in some critical dimension of your self-actualization needs. In many cases, giving up, or even just flunking out, teaches you a lot about what really matters to you. With a rage to master, you operate like a star-powered Super Mario. But a of lack passion usually breeds incompetence.

I believe that a lot of people get fired from their jobs, not because they aren’t smart enough to do the work, but because they’re doing work that isn’t aligned with their highest values, and that makes them into poor performers.

Changing Your Approach

The most important part of learning from failure is that you try something different on each attempt. A lot of dream chasers get really discouraged when they don’t succeed right away, as if really successful people don’t fail. Successful people fail constantly; the difference is that they keep moving forward anyway. Just like any guy who does a lot of social skydiving knows that meeting hot girls is almost guaranteed once you learn to embrace rejection, so it is that virtually every goal is achievable once you start treating failure as a lesson instead of a stop sign.

Most people understand intellectually that failures are just lessons in disguise, but few people act that way. The fear of failure often arrests their ambition. But the only thing crazier than worrying about something that probably won’t happen is worrying about something that will. And if you’re taking action to achieve your goals, failure is almost guaranteed at some point. The main question is how you’ll respond when shit hits fan.

I find that the trial and error lifestyle is best organized around short bursts of time in which you start making big changes. In any given 30-day period, I’m usually in the midst of installing a couple new habits, removing some old ones, experimenting with new ways of driving traffic to my blog, learning to eat healthier, tweaking my creative process, and whatever else. Most of these adventures are documented on this blog.

To master the art of competent failure, try living your life as a series of small experiments. Set clear goals to execute on a time schedule that keeps you on your toes. At the end of every action cycle, ask yourself:

1. What result did I expect?
2. What was the actual result?
3. If expected and actual don’t match up, what went wrong? (Try to come up with at least two or three reasons.)
4. What one variable could I change next time to have a better chance of achieving the desired result? (Again, try to think of a few possibilities.)

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Any goal worth achieving has at least 10,000 reasonable solutions that may or may not work, but most people give up after trying the first 2 or 3. Your capacity to stop living by coincidence and start living on purpose can be measured by answering just one question: How many failures does it take to keep you down?