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Daring Failure

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Growing and learning new things implies stepping out of our comfort zone. True differentiation and growth is achievable only if you are willing to dive into new areas1 and try things that may work or not. As a consequence, learning something new always implies the risk of failure.

Several authors write about the importance of failure. If you never risk failure –if you never fail– then you aren’t trying hard enough, you are not learning. As Dan Norris writes in Create or Hate:

If you aren’t regularly failing, you aren’t seeking a new destination. You are following a predictable path that doesn’t lead to anything new and you are learning nothing. You aren’t creating anything either. In other words, you are failing. You are failing to grow and failing to improve and failing to realize your full potential.

Part of the problem is we often forget that stepping out of our comfort zone generates… discomfort. The romantic view we had about our pleasant journey towards our goals gets shattered by reality.

We need to plan our actions in such way that we push ourselves enough to make progress, but don’t strain so much that the effort becomes unsustainable. James Clear calls this the magical zone of long-term growth.

We also need to overcome our ego. We don’t like to fail. At least I don’t. Do you know people that publish their failures on their Facebook timeline? Our ego is so treacherous we can end up creating a narrative rationalizing our behaviour, explaining to ourselves why remaining comfortable, not daring, is the sensible alternative. Steven Pressfield, in his book The War of Art, calls this The Resistance.

Face your fears. Be bold and accept enough risk to make progress, but don’t be reckless or behave like a madman. Be smart and have a safety net. And then, dare to do things that can fail.

  1. cfr David Van Rooy, Walmart’s Senior Director of International Human Resources Strategy and Operations, quoted by Forbes Magazine. ↩

Create or Hate. Successful People Make Things, by Dan Norris

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Even if some factors that lead people to be successful could be attributed to sheer luck, a common trait is that successful people create things.

In Norris’ vision, creating something –that is, being creative– has little to do with wild talent and is more about productivity. The first requisite for being creative is to start to do something.

In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes about The Resistance, the voice that delays us from doing our work, the self-sabotaging habits of procrastination, self-doubt, susceptibility to distraction, perfectionism, and shallowness. Dan Norris’ nemesis to creativity is Hate.

“Haters don’t create anything, and instead get caught up in a never-ending cycle of Hate feeding Hate and criticism triumphing over creation.” The hate ecosystem nurtures from negative people that may surround us or work with us. However, what most hinders our capacity to do things is own self-hate.

It turns out that people can be very good at making up reasons [for not making things]. Not all reasons are invalid, but we have to beware of Hate breeding excuses.

Some common excuses are:

  • It’s expensive
  • I don’t want to divide my attention
  • I don’t want to be one of those guys/gals that teaches people something before they know it themselves.
  • There is too much effort needed to start
  • The learning curve. I will definitely suck at the first try
  • I see no purpose to get it going
  • I don’t have what it takes

The second half of the book is about how to fight hate. For conquering hate, we need to accept failure as part of the creative process, an essential part of creating anything. Self awareness and gratefulness are our allies in our fight for being creative.

The final chapter gives practical advice that can give you some ideas on how to improve your creative process.

I specially liked to chapter on how empathy breeds creativity. Empathy is hard, and not commonly understood.

Your goal in being empathic is to imagine what it’s like to be that person and feel what they are feeling. If you can improve your empathy, you improve your imagination. And imagination is the source of all creativity.

The author is not shy about his own failures and learned lessons. For me, this showing himself vulnerable by reflecting about his own experiences is one of the things that makes the book valuable.

The Traits of the Most Successful Founders according to YCombinator’s Jessica Livingston

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Sam Altman interviews Jessica Livingston, co-founder of YCombinator and author of Founder’s at Work. Stories of Startup’s early days.

The interview is great, and you should watch or read it in full if you are involved in startups, building your own product or service. Traits of the most successful founders are determination, understanding your users and building a product with a great user experience, being flexible minded, and being great leaders.

How about looking for these traits in your future hires?

Jessica: The most successful founders I have noticed are totally focused on two things, building their product and making something people want, which of course, is our motto, and talking to their users. And they do not let themselves get distracted by anything else. And that seems so obvious, but what’s not obvious is how easily distracted founders can be by lots of other things going on, and the most successful startups are like hyper-focused on their product.

(…)
Sam: Are there other traits in the founders that go on to really change the future, besides determination that separates the very best founders from the mediocre founders? Have you noticed any other traits that kind of founders should aspire to that really wanna have a big impact?

Jessica: Yes. If I had to say the most important traits of the most successful founders, I’ve already mentioned determination. That is by far the most important.

Sam: More than intelligence?

Jessica: More than intelligence, more than previous success, you know, in school. I mean, remember when we started Y Combinator, our hypothesis was, “We’ll just fund all the best hackers from MIT and Harvard, and they’ll turn out to be great sort of founders.” That is not true. That is absolutely not true. A lot of them are good. (…) Determination is the most important thing. Again, sort of understanding your users and building a product with a great user experience is second most important. Not being distracted, not getting lured down these paths that aren’t gonna be important for building your product. Being flexible minded I’ve always felt this very important, because you have this idea and you test it out, and it doesn’t always work the first time. And so you have to be able to say, “Okay, I thought I was gonna do this, but let’s try this. Even though I have like a lot of energy invested in this, let’s try this direction.” You really have to be open-minded. And then, ultimately, you have to be a good leader. You have to be convincing and a good leader because you are gonna be convincing employees to join you, you are gonna be convincing investors to invest in you. When you do get to the point where you are doing deals with bigger companies, you have to convince them. Like, your whole world is convincing people. And so you have to be able to communicate your idea and convince people why they should care about you more than any of the other hundreds of startups out there.

(emphasis is mine)

Watch the whole interview (also available on YouTube{: target=”blank”}) or read the transcript here.

I’m Right. You’re Wrong

Posted by Roberto Zoia on | ∞ Link to this article |

We are having an argument

In a hypothetical situation, most people would say that they will respect other people’s point of view even if they don’t agree with it or don’t understand it.

In practice, however, this is hardly so. We have a hard time understanding why others don’t share our point of view, specially when those points of view influence laws, political decisions, or challenge the way we live or think. It can affect our mood, even provoke angry reactions and harsh comments.

Not convinced? An example: What is your position regarding gun control? What do you think of the opposite position? How about same-sex marriage? What do you think of people that don’t share your point of view?

Empathy is usually associated with sharing and relating to the feelings of others. But it doesn’t stop there. Empathy is at the very center of understanding other people’s points of view.

When we have trouble understanding someone else, or why somebody acts the way she does, consider what Seth Godin writes about Empathy:

Empathy doesn’t involve feeling sorry for someone. It is our honest answer to the question, why did they do what they did?” (…)

The useful answer is rarely, “because they’re stupid.” Or even, “because they’re evil.” In fact, most of the time, people with similar information, similar beliefs and similar apparent choices will choose similar actions. So if you want to know why someone does what they do, start with what they know, what they believe and where they came from.

Learning to employ empathy to better understand others, and to be better understood ourselves is a skill worth acquiring.

YCombinator’s Sam Altman sits down with Mark Zuckerberg to talk about how to build the future

Posted by Roberto Zoia on | ∞ Link to this article |

YCombinator is one of the world’s top startup school. Stripe, Dropbox, AirBnB, Reddit, Weebly are some of the companies that have emerged from YCombinator. They provide seed funding for startups, and work with them on their ideas.

Sam Altam, President of YCombinator, interviews Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Among other interesting passages in the interview, Mark explains why they don’t believe at Facebook that experience is that important when hiring:

SamAltman: Another thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring, and I always tell founders that this is the thing you have to get good at. So how have you hired your team and what do you look for when you bring people on?

MarkZuckerberg: If you think about it, I started the company when I was 19, so I can’t institutionally believe that experience is that important, right, or else I would have a hard time reckoning selling myself and the company. So we invest in people who we think are just really talented, even if they haven’t done that thing before. And that applies to people who are fresh out of university as well as people like the CFO, who took the company public, had not taken a company public before, and a lot of his background was in production development at Genentech before. So just focusing on really talented people.

SamAltman: So if you don’t have the experience to look for, how do you assess someone’s raw talent?

MarkZuckerberg: Well, often you can tell from different things that they’ve done. So it’s not that… Obviously, everyone’s done something. Even if you’re 19, you’ve done side projects and interesting stuff, and I think what’s important is not to believe that someone has to have specifically done the job that they’re going to do in order to be able to do it well. One of the things that I think we’ve done well is just giving the people at the company a lot of opportunity, so it’s not just me who started when I was 19 and now I’m running this big company. There were a number of people who joined who were people I did problem sets with at Harvard or dropped out of Stanford or different programs who’ve grown with the company over this long period of time. And one of the things that I’m most proud of is we have about 12 different product groups at the company, and all of the people who are running them, with the exception of one, did not join the company running a product group or reporting to me.