I wrote Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure (UK) (US) several years ago, but I’ve not stopped thinking and talking about the idea. So often we’re told to “learn from our mistakes” or “fail forward”, but the truth is that this advice isn’t easy to take: failure is painful and denial is common.
Here are a few of my favourite books on the topic:
I encountered Little Bets (UK) (US) by Peter Sims just as Adapt was coming out, and loved it. Peter had come to similar conclusions but had a totally different range of examples (from Chris Rock to Frank Gehry, if I recall correctly) and a winning, informal style.
Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong (UK) (US) is beautifully written (Schulz later won a Pulitzer prize) and a fascinating discussion of the history and psychology of wrongness.
To go deeper into the psychology of wrongness, try Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) (UK) (US) by two academics, Carol Tavris and Eliot Aronson. (Aronson was a research assistant on one of the most famous studies of wrongness, Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails.) The book is highly accessible and full of interesting testaments to the power of denial.
And for a more recent synthesis, try Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking (UK) (US), which focuses in particular on the importance of examining and learning from our errors (as with an aeroplane black box).
Happy failing!
My new book is “Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy”. Grab yourself a copy in the US or in the UK (slightly different title) or through your local bookshop.