The Art of Doing

Category: On Failure

How to Succeed at Failing: A SketchNote

When we interviewed superachievers for our book, we wanted to know how they had achieved their incredible success but in our conversations with them, something kept coming up that surprised us.

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When we interviewed superachievers for our book, we wanted to know how they had achieved their incredible success but in our conversations with them, something kept coming up that surprised us. As we dug into the chronologies of these people’s lives and careers, we found that even more than their triumphs, it was failure that actually shaped their stories of success. What is failure? What’s the science behind it? Is there an art to it? Why do some people collapse in the face of it while others actually profit from it?

It’s become our latest obsession. Continue reading “How to Succeed at Failing: A SketchNote”

The Self-Assured, the Self-Critic, the C-Student and Other Failure-Resistant Archetypes

Do you have what it takes to bounce back from failure? Your personality speaks volumes about how you’ll cope when setbacks happen.

 

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Your personality speaks volumes about how you’ll cope when setbacks happen. 

Do you have what it takes to bounce back from failure?

Cass Phillipps, has witnessed more flameouts than an American Idol. The San Francisco entrepreneur started FailCon, the first conference ever to ask successful founders, investors, designers and developers, “What’s gone wrong and how did you fix it?”

It was Phillipps’s own failure that inspired her to start the conference in 2009. When a startup she launched was flailing and she needed advice, she was frustrated by the smiley-faced “if you don’t have something self-promotional to say, don’t say anything at all” startup conferences she was attending. She didn’t need to know what to do in the face of success, but what action to take in the face of failure.

Since then at FailCon (which has now gone global), Phillipps has been witness to the confessionals of hundreds of self-professed failures, big fish (some of the biggest names in tech including PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and Zynga’s Mark Pincus), small fries, the famous, the infamous and everyone in between. She’s heard these failure testifiers stand up in front of a crowd and share their tales of tragedy and woe, for personal catharsis and the spread of useful knowledge of what to do and what not to do.

So who gets over failure best? Phillipps, who should know, offers Five Fail Survivor Archetypes: Continue reading “The Self-Assured, the Self-Critic, the C-Student and Other Failure-Resistant Archetypes”