Failure Lab

While success is a booster for our ego, failure is a trainer for our future. It calls up our courage, injects empathy in us, boosts our immunity for fragility, and teaches us vital life lessons. “There’s a lot to like about failure.”, said Karen Finerman, the hedge fund manager and the author of “Secrets I’d Only Tell My Daughters About Business and Life”. She said all the successful women she knows had disastrous failures, but they made them tougher.

The Y Combinator founder, Paul Graham, said, “Fail early. Fail often”. Disney bankrupted his first animation company before he built Disney Studio. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, the company he founded, so he started Pixar. The common thread is that every successful person today is successful because of, not in spite of, their failures.

Most of us design our life carefully and safely. We don’t take high failure rate risks and we always have a plan B in the back of our minds. The funny thing is that despite the most meticulous person’s best efforts to prevent a surprise, life will always cause the unexpected to occur. Our parents divorce, a sudden death, or a global pandemic. Life is about the unexpected. That’s why our ability to be flexible and bounce back is fundamental to our wellbeing. The only way to build our mental toughness is to embrace failure instead of avoiding it.

In our Failure Lab, we created the following list of possible projects that you might want to try. If and when you fail, you will still be making a difference in the world because you’ll be helping to break down the stigma behind failure. Feel free to create your own project. Make sure to update us on your learning and progress.