“Failure.” Does anybody feel good when you think about your experience of failure? People always want to be the first or a winner. You might have heard about the sentence “Mistakes breed success” over and over. However, people still feel hard to accept that. Here is a person who says the biggest successes often comes from failures. Randy Komisar, one of the adventurous entrepreneurs in California’s Silicon Valley, talks about the importance of failure. Silicon Valley is the place where entrepreneurs gather and produce advanced technological products. Komisar explained Silicon Valley by showing the similarity between Silicon Valley and home-run batters. Home-run batters strike out more than 500 times to hit one home-run. Also in Silicon Valley, they experience failure more than 500 times to succeed with one product. That’s how Silicon Valley in California became a symbol of technological innovation internationally.
“What generally lacking is a culture of constructive failure. Constructive failure is the ability to tolerate failure, proceed with your career, and do it again, and to take your experience and cash in on it as an asset. Still many business cultures were: when you fail, you’re finished.”
Like he said, most people are afraid of failure and it leads to hesitation in taking on challenges these days. Then, ultimately, it will make our world stop to innovate. He pointed out that what really accounts is not the fact that we failed, but how do we deal with this failure. He explained with his real experience, GO. GO was a company which made a 75-milliondollar loss. He said this financial failure gave him a different view of his failures. At first, he might have felt a little bit of despair, but nobody saw it as a failure broadly, because people in the executive team of GOwent off and founded quite renowned companies, such as Netscape and VeriSign, and also he himself went off and ran LucasArts Entertainment. As the company failed, a lot of big companies had the chance to be founded.
“Innovation is taking a risk to do things that haven’t been done before.” As he stressed in this lecture, you should not be afraid of failure or reluctant to take on a challenge if you want to innovate yourself. Don’t be afraid of failing. Many people fail in order to succeed.
