James Altucher launched over 20 businesses, 17 of which failed. He and Evan Carmichael argue that failure should be reframed as an experiment that generates data, not something to celebrate or shame. The real work is extracting lessons from setbacks and focusing on the learning process itself.
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So the question of the day today is—
I forgot there's that part too, right? Okay. It just comes out naturally. I don't plan this.
Obviously. Good morning, Believe Nation.
Today's message is: view failure as an experiment. Over to you, James Altucher.
I had failed and succeeded, and I started over 20 businesses, 17 of them failed. And we unfortunately live now in this culture that almost glorifies failure. Like, it's— we're supposed to be so happy. Oh, fail fast, fail. It's like this failure pornography almost, that we just like, we just worship people who fail and then somehow succeed. But I could tell you, like, failure is really unpleasant, and it's much better to view it as Much better to view it as like an experiment. Like Thomas Edison, you know, he didn't fail 10,000 times when he was making an electric light bulb. He just experimented and then he made an electric light bulb. We don't consider that the guy was lying on the street about to kill himself on the very first try. He tried 10,000 times.
So what do you think?
I love the perspective that he took. It's kind of true, right? Like a lot of messages are right now, you know what, failure is not a bad thing. You want to enjoy failure, you want to love pain. Like, it's almost like promoting sort of kind of a masochistic kind of mentality of like pain is good for you. And so the example in the previous video, if you, if you're watching all these videos, one of them was we invest a lot of time, a lot of, you know, capital into this new thing for the business for Toronto Dance Salsa to work the back end. It failed. Super frustrating. Not happy with it. But it's like What's the lesson? Like, what are the good things that we can take away from this feature, you know, this product that we tried to bring in that we can use to improve, you know, Toronto Southside? And it also helped us understand a little bit about our own business and our own needs, right? You know, as we went in, we thought this is what we needed, but we realized we need something different. So it's funny, I'm going to use a Batman quote. It was, I think it was by Alfred. He said, why do we fall, sir? So we can learn to Get back up, something like that. I might be butchering it, so don't hate me for it.
I wanted to save Gotham. I failed.
Why do we fall, sir?
So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.
I think that— so it's the lesson that you learn from it. You don't have to enjoy pain, you don't have to enjoy failure. I mean, you have to get up and try again. Because if you choose not to learn something or you just focus too much on the pain, then like, what's the point? Like, what's the point of going through all that or even trying something, right? So you just need to be aware of what can I take away that's a golden nugget that I can take somewhere else.
This is an interesting one for me. I think a lot of people are attached to failure. A lot of people are afraid to start. And for me, it's just— it's— I think people are just too attached to the outcome than the process. I enjoy the process. Even if it's a failed outcome, I I still enjoy the process. You know, the project that we talked about for Toronto Net Salsa that failed, that's eating up a ton of time, that's putting us 3 months behind where we're supposed to be, I still enjoyed the process of thinking, "How can we make our school better?" And we're still gonna learn some things through that that will make the school better. Even though the end result was frustration and, you know, students not signing up as many as we should have, I still enjoyed the process. And I'll do it again. You know, which will hopefully have a better result because we'll do it smarter the next time. I look at the YouTube videos, I enjoy the process of making the videos. You know, it's Wednesday afternoon when we're recording these. I enjoy every Wednesday afternoon. I make it because I want to make it. I make it because I love making it. We've changed a lot of the videos in the series. Some have been added, some have been removed. The ones that have been removed, I don't see as this failure that I can't get over, that was this huge mistake. It didn't lead to the results that I wanted, or maybe I just grew bored of making those videos, and they were doing well, but I like the challenge of the process of making the videos better and trying new things. And so I think when people get too addicted to the outcome, then you see failure as a huge thing. And I don't, I don't celebrate failure, and I also don't get hamstrung by it. I just don't care. Like, I like the process of making, I like the process of doing it, and I don't get so attached to the outcome that it holds me back from doing something else. So, I don't know, let's just not care about failure. Let's not celebrate it, let's not be held back by it. Why do you care? Just go out and do, learn and get better, and express yourself through the art that you're creating. That's, for me, You know, like, I could have the greatest results, but if making these videos was a negative for me, like, "Ugh, I have to go in and record more videos," right, then it's never gonna do really well. So you have to love what you do and enjoy the process and not just be addicted to the outcome. I don't know, that's what I took from it. Maybe that's not the message, but that's what I took from it.
I love it. So the question of the day today is: Share a lesson that you learned from one of your failed experiments.
I like it. Leave in the comments below, we'll join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching, have an amazing day, continue to believe, and we'll see you again tomorrow morning for another Shot of Espresso. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.
