An interview with Valve Software executives listed over a dozen mistakes. Interestingly enough, these luminaries fired off their errors without a second thought.
The interview is a little hard to follow if you’re not into the gaming scene, but there are a couple of great quotes:
Gabe Newell: What else… Prospero, the game that we never shipped.
…
Erik Johnson: Absolutely. Those products and features that have never seen the light of day, but it’s really hard to count those as ‘failure’ as they all end up somewhere.
Another example:
Gabe Newell: Yeah, you’d like to absorb your failures before they torture your customers.
And finally:
Gabe Newell: That was a useful failure to us because it was so clearly dumb that it made us say, “OK, what are we actually good at that we can do instead?” It was not optimising for the right thing.
These video game designers are wildly successful. They are probably all millionaires and have certainly created products that have been enjoyed by millions of people. Yet still, they fail. They even talk about their failures.
Failure is the secret to success. Find out more in the book today!