Peter Thiel contrasts how Western Europe and California view failure. Europe makes it too hard to fail, California treats it too lightly. When you work hard and fail anyway, the causes are usually overdetermined: wrong people, bad idea, poor timing, no monopoly. There's little to learn, so the answer is to keep going.
I think there's a problem in Western Europe. It's too impossible to fail. Once you fail, you can never start over. There's an opposite version of this in California, where I think sometimes people are a little bit too facile about failure. It actually is always incredibly damaging to people. And if you work really hard at something and it doesn't work, that's going to be psychologically damaging. People have less confidence. There are all sorts of reasons why that tends to be quite bad. I don't think there's that much you learn from failure, by the way, because it's typically over determined. It's like, why is technology slowing down? Why did you fail? It's typically five separate reasons. You worked with the wrong people. The idea was bad, the timing was wrong, it wasn't a monopoly, the product didn't work. And okay, next time I'm working with different people, you figure out one out of the five things you're likely to fail again. So failure is not something one can learn very much from. That's a method myth that I would challenge. But what I think you should do when something goes badly wrong is you just keep going and you don't dwell on the past.
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