Learning to fail, or failing to learn? How to harness failure to learn from your mistakes and build the future you want

To build the future you want to see, you first need to fail. But it’s not enough to fail, or even just fail fast, as the Silicon Valley mantra goes. What’s more important is to learn from each failure and keep trying, until you reach success, says tech and innovation expert Pascal Finette. 

“It’s not really about failing fast. It’s really about failing faster and faster, then, eventually, succeeding. This is true for business, it’s true if you run a company, it’s true if you’re in the academic field and it’s true for your life,” he says. 

Finette, who has held leadership positions at major tech companies like Mozilla, Google and eBay, is an entrepreneur, startup expert and strategic advisor and now heads up his own boutique advisory firm, Be Radical. 

That experience has given Finette significant expertise on seizing innovation opportunities and sharing “a mental model and practical future about how to approach the future in a better way.” 

Thinking about the future means thinking about the unknown and the invisible—to a certain extent, we don’t know what’s coming, even if we have a good idea about what we hope might happen or how we might want to influence it. An important part of thinking about the future, especially for young people and students, is thinking about how to ‘future-proof’ themselves against the evolving educational and business settings years down the road. For Finette, one of the most important skills to carry into the future, and to enable smarter, more successful prototyping, is not just the ability to fail, but to find purpose and insights in those failures. 

But it’s not as simple as trying again and again and again. For failure to be productive and help us build the futures we want, we need to adjust our view of the Silicon Valley mantra of failing - because that doesn’t tell us the whole story. Instead, Finette looks at failure through the lens of an acronym—FAIL—“First Attempt In Learning.”

“Because it’s really not about failing, of course. It’s about learning,” he says. 

In fact, this point is rooted in how our brains think about failure and learning. When humans think about failure, it’s the amygdala—the oldest part of our brain, from an evolutionary standpoint—is triggered. It’s essentially a warning to go no further down that road, or with that idea, or with that project. But when we think about something as a learning experience, it triggers the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is the part responsible for our creativity. 

“So my appeal to you is, forget failing. Really focus on learning,” says Finette. “Focus on the art and the science of learning.” 

So how can you use failing to facilitate the learning process? Finette suggests adopting a roadmap for rapid prototyping, detailing his four-step process: formulating the thesis, formulating the hypothesis, prototyping and testing, and learning and learning again. Developing the skills to use this approach for our work, our projects and even our relationships is crucial for success both today and in the future, Finette says.  

“The best way to lean into the future is to prototype it, to try it out, to do these quick iterations, to get into this habit of trying things out and doing so in the quickest possible way.”

Question: Have you experienced a failure that was really a FAIL - “First Attempt in Learning?” How did it enable you to achieve success more quickly, and what did you learn from the experience?

About Wavemakers

The Wavemakers program is a first-of-its-kind work-integrated learning program that leverages cutting-edge, accessible virtual reality technology and forward-thinking speakers. Wavemakers provides post-secondary students from diverse backgrounds, experiences and perspectives with the opportunity to come together, develop and cultivate future-proof skills, and build long-lasting connections with industry leaders, to help their transition into the workplace. It’s about providing meaningful opportunities to a diverse community of future leaders who can tackle today’s big challenges with even bigger and bolder ideas that will carry us into a more positive and inclusive tomorrow.