Fail Fast and Move On
“Don’t overthink, fail fast and move on” was a piece of advice I came across on a sleepless night whilst browsing the BBC CEO advice section. What he meant was that it’s more productive to put your ideas to test earlier rather than later. And if they fail, learn from the mistakes and use that on your next venture. Accept failure as part of the process.
As a person that gets hung up on my failures, this simple idea sounded revolutionary. The thing about “simple ideas”, though, is that they are rather complex to enact. As S. Freud posits in a text from 1914, Remembering, Repeating and Working-through, knowing your barriers won’t automatically free you from their chains. Time is needed for one to learn to identify their behaviour patterns and to then, eventually, move on.
I am still chewing on a bad interview I had a few weeks ago. I failed to understand the final product was the presentation and that I should have spent more time on that to make sure it served all the goals and the expectations of the audience.
However, a brighter way to look at this is that it was a quick fail, that taught me a lesson that I need a new opportunity to test out. The more of those experiences I have, the more I will get to grow. Make new mistakes, learn from them and move on, because failure is part of the process.
