Does willingness to fail repeatedly accelerate learning and produce better performers than avoiding failure?

Tony Fadell · Mar 15, 2021

Real learning only happens after you've tried to do something — the sequence is do, fail, learn, do again

The first bridges and boats were built with no books or teachers; people tried, failed, and built better ones — that's how the world changes

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Craig Courtemanche · Dec 4, 2023

To develop people you must let them fail, while limiting the blast radius so no failure is existential

People only learn to overcome obstacles by experiencing and recovering from mistakes themselves; like parenting, catching them every time prevents learning

Scope: failures must not be existential threats to the business; requires a lot of trust from the leader

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Daniel Khachab · Oct 28, 2024

Those willing to fail repeatedly learn fastest and become the best performers

As a ski instructor he saw that the kids who fell all the time learned fastest, while those who avoided falling again stopped learning

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Sri Batchu · Jul 26, 2023 · hedged

Relying on human sales reps rather than pushing toward self-serve and automation is a short-term gain that risks a long-term problem: an oversized sales team that is hard to scale, hard to manage, and expensive

Humans are currently better at certain steps because of intangibles that haven't been productized, but that advantage compounds into headcount dependency

34:50 Over relying on human reps now risks an unscalable oversized sales team later

Harry Stebbings · Dec 4, 2023

Delegation often breaks down because the delegate initially does the task worse, prompting you to take it back, so they never get the chance to learn — and the speaker doesn't know how to break that cycle

Poor first attempts feel like proof they need you, so you re-insert yourself and remove their chance to improve

34:30 Retaking tasks after early poor attempts blocks the learning that failure tolerance would produce