While scrolling through my Instagram reels feed, I came across a reel of Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, talking about the need to fail fast, which motivated me to write a post. ‘Fail fast’ is a recent piece of advice I have been hearing since I embarked on my PhD; fail fast on the research directions that we plan to pursue so that we can understand the difficulties and limitations of the research problems and methods used which will in turn give us more time to finetune our problem and develop more nuanced approaches. Since childhood, most of us have been taught that failures eventually lead to success and that persevering towards success is critical. However, one thing that I could not come to terms with is the narrative of several failures ‘magically’ leading to success. If you were destined to be successful, why would you even fail? And also, for every failure-to-success story we hear, there are many other stories of failure that we don’t.
I believe ‘failing fast’ is a more refined stand on the idea of failures eventually leading to success. Failing fast allows us to understand the difficulties of the task we are working on; it could be due to our limited capabilities or the nature of the problem itself. However, an advantage of learning those limitations early is saving time and energy. Through the process of failing fast, we also learn our strengths and weaknesses, which in turn helps us pick or finetune the tasks or problems so that we may have a higher chance of success.
In my opinion, there are three ways in which we can adopt the mentality to fail fast. First, build the tolerance to failure. Just because you fail several times in a short period of time doesn’t mean you are incapable. It just means you have found several ways that need to be revised. What is essential in these several instances of failure is to gather feedback from them and iterate such that the shortfalls in the previous iteration are improved upon in the next. That way, failures become actual lessons.
Next, take one step at a time. Break the path to success down into a few milestones. The journey to success need not be end-to-end; it can also be attained over several steps. If the path to success is A → B → C → D, with D being the success milestone, instead of trying to achieve D directly, achieve A first, followed by B and C. It could be much faster to fail and eventually succeed at A compared to D, which means you are already a third of the way to success. A step-by-step approach could help to save energy and may even cut back on time to eventual success.
Last but not least, a failure could be a branching point. Often, we may view success as taking a fixed path to the destination. However, there could be several other paths to success. By failing fast on milestones, we encounter several checkpoints to evaluate the path taken. Failing fast provides an avenue to re-assess our milestones several times and think about ways to achieve the same goal by taking a slightly different approach or branch.
Though one may not celebrate failures, it is integral to embrace them and iterate quickly. I believe that such an approach to failure could lead to a more positive experience towards our successes that also helps us grow as strong-willed, creative individuals.
