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Seek to Misconstrue   + a

Failure: The Blog  

August 2018

  • When This Executive Was Fired, He Took Charge
  • Obeying The Speed Limit Has Never Been More Fun
  • London Black Cabs Helped Uber Grow
  • Bette Graham Created A Product To Fix Her Mistakes
  • Flamin' Hot Cheetos Had An Interesting Start

July 2018

  • Fear This Instead Of Failure
  • Re-Releasing Songs Created Success
  • A CEO's Purposeful Mistake
  • The Tardy Student And The Unsolvable Problem
  • Fixing Potholes Through Graffiti

June 2018

  • A Surprising Mistake In The Oxford English Dictionary
  • US Army Embraces Mistakes
  • Blocking A Hymn
  • Eddie Shore Was Truly A Tough Guy
  • [Video] Elon Musk Didn't "Pivot" He Failed

May 2018

  • 8 Examples of Mental Toughness Part 2
  • Necessity Turned Accessory: Allen Iverson's Sleeve
  • This Doctor Has Continued To Fail
  • 8 Examples of Mental Toughness
  • MIT Accidentally Creates New Smelting Process

April 2018

  • Johnny Cash Quit Singing Lessons
  • Cruise Control Came Out of Frustration
  • Time Spent Gaming Pays Off In The Navy
  • Rock Around The Clock Was a Commercial Failure
  • Sigmund Freud Should Have Been Discouraged

March 2018

  • Superman Couldn't Fly
  • This School Shares Failures
  • Jim Croce's Parents Hoped He Would Fail

[More archives...]

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Something Worse Than Failure

August 11th, 2012 - by Robby Slaughter

Screwing up is bad news. After all, it’s a mistake. But according to one blogger, there is a fate far worse than error.

This comes from a writer at the website OnStartups.com:

Here’s the big lesson: Many founders think that the worst outcome you can have in a startup is failure. You try something and it fails. And yes, failing sucks. But, what’s worse than failing is going sideways for years and years. Being stuck in a quagmire of mediocrity. Things are going reasonably well, but not spectacularly well. The reason mediocrity sucks more than failure is very simple: Failure lets you move on, mediocrity stalls you and keeps you from reaching your potential.

failure and success
Photo © Flickr User hans.gerwitz

Writer Dharmesh Shah has gone viral with this post. So much so, he even added an update with a powerful quote from Tim O’Relly:

Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.

Failure is the secret to success. But mediocrity is a special kind of failure: it’s one that is not definitive enough to feel like you are really doing anything wrong. If you are just getting by, you may never have the experience of doing it wrong so that you want to stop and start over.

Watch out for doing something only well enough that it doesn’t actually matter.

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