The Kellogg School of Management and Associate Professor, Dashun Wang, did a study where they looked at datasets for entrepreneurs, terrorist organizations and scientists. Yes, you heard that right, terrorist organizations. They wanted to better understand the fine line of winning and losing.
What Wang found was that the people who experience early experiences of losing and failure will continually succeed later on in life. What tends to happen when we win early in life is that we take our foot off the gas and attribute success to being easy.
The message is, fail fast, fail often and learn from those failures!
Out of the three groups Wang studied (entrepreneurs, scientists, and terrorist organizations) all these groups who failed over and over, eventually succeeded. Failing is prescriptive. In other words, if we want to be successful later on, we need to fail early. The key is to look at those failures and learn. If we don’t learn, then we get stuck in the stagnation region.
Two things you can be mindful of;
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If I am not failing, I am not taking risks.
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If I am not failing, I am in stagnation region.