A reflection on the gigantic difference between failing and failure

Failing… Failing fast… Failing often… You’ve heard a lot of this talk in the startup world over the years. In fact, I have a slew of blog posts about failure.

The general idea is that if you never fail – if everything you try works the first time – then you’re not trying enough new things. The only way to learn is by failing.

But there’s a GIGANTIC difference between failing and failure.

I was talking to another entrepreneur recently about some pivots we’re going through at Dragon Army, such as taking the control of what games we make out of my hands and into the team’s hands. These pivots in the company are because I studied our current path and realized if we didn’t make changes, the company would not succeed.

My friend pointed out that it seemed like I was afraid of failing, that the changes I was making were because I was not as comfortable with failure as I proclaim to be in blog posts and startup discussions.

I took some time to reflect on this because it seemed like he had a point. Maybe I was simply too scared to fail and making decisions based on that fear. It’s not an unreasonable assumption. After all, I prefer to succeed and having had success, I’d sure like to have more of it :)

But then I realized – it was the failures that we have had over the last year that led me to these changes in the company. We have failed A TON in the first year at Dragon Army, almost all of which can be directly tied to my decisions. We took chances and some worked out and some did not. But those failures ultimately were a positive thing because they showed me the correct way forward.

Being comfortable with failure means having the ability to take chances – knowing that some will work and some won’t – and having confidence that you will learn from those failures in order to make your company stronger.

The goal is for your company to succeed. No one is comfortable with their business failing. They try like hell to make sure that it doesn’t.

Thomas Edison famously said that he failed 10,000 times in his attempt to create the lightbulb. But in the end, he still succeeded in making the lightbulb. He did not allow himself to fail, but he was comfortable with failure along the way.