Azim Premji says generating good ideas means tolerating many bad ones, then discarding them fast. He cites Richard Feynman's advice to "fail as fast as I can" and argues that lessons from failures should be recycled. Break big ambitions into the smallest possible actions instead of waiting for perfect resources.
Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is: Fail as fast as you can. Over to you, Azeem Premji.
We must allow for creative failure when it comes to generating ideas. It is inevitable. No one likes failure, particularly business leaders. But unfortunately, all evidence suggests that it is impossible to generate a few good ideas without a lot of bad ideas. And bad ideas are expensive, but they have to be tolerated. As the physics Nobel Prize winner Feynman said, "I try to fail as fast as I can." That is the best way to move forward on a new idea. Fail as fast as you can. Failure should be forgiven and forgotten as long as the lessons are remembered and recycled.
This topic has come up a number of times in the channel, and I think people are just too hung up on failure. They see failure as this big permanent thing that's a spot on their resume or on their life, and they can never overcome it. Just change your mindset about failure. Failure is going to happen. It means you're, you're trying stuff. You cannot have success without failure. They are They are together. You fail a bunch of times, you learn what not to do, and then you succeed. The only way to not have any failure is that you're living life so safe that you've never tried anything, and in my view, that's the biggest failure of all. The one thing I might change in this line of thinking though, instead of fail as fast as you can, is try as fast as you can. If you have a new idea, try it. It will likely lead to failure, but maybe it won't. Like maybe you'll find a way to make it work, or maybe it fails and then you find another way to stay in and another way to do it. Where I think too many people have these big ideas that they wanna try, right? You've got this goal that you have, this life purpose, or some huge thing that you wanna try, and you build it up to be this massive project, this massive idea, and the only way you're ever gonna take action is if you line up all these pieces. Well, in order for me to do that, I need to do this, this, this, this, and these people on my team, I need to have venture capital funding, I need to have all of these things align for me to do it, and they never align. That stuff never happens, and so you never end up going for that big dream of yours. And then most people end up dying with their song still in them. They die with that book still in them. They die with that business idea still in them because they never took action because there's always some big project that they never had the resources to do. Where what you wanna do is break it down. Try as fast as possible. Find the smallest possible way to get started and get started on it. If you have an idea for something you wanna do, Don't wait a year, 10 years, or never to do it. Find a small way to do it. What will happen is, one, you may go into it and find out that you don't like it anymore, right? Like, well, that's a relief. I didn't spend 5 years pining about this certain industry or this dream job or ideal business I want to start and then figure out that it wasn't for me, right? Like, that could give you amazing knowledge that saves you a ton of time. Or two, you find out that you do love it. And makes you come alive, no matter how much planning you do at the start, no matter how much planning for this ideal business, your plan will be wrong. Your plan will change because the environment changes, the market conditions change, your customers change, but also you don't know enough. Like, you don't know enough until you get out and actually try to do stuff. So you get out and you adjust and you see what the customers want, you see how they're reacting. So whatever it is that you have this big idea in your head that you haven't started on and And you're waiting for perfect resources and opportunities to come along. Forget all that, throw it out the door. There's always a smaller way to get started. The trick to moving forward on these big projects is the moment that you set a goal, you take some kind of immediate action towards achieving that goal, no matter how small. Some kind of immediate action towards achieving that goal to start building up momentum, baby steps. And I know you want to take giant leaps, but if you look back at what helped make those giant leaps for yourself and for other people, it's very rarely going from here to here. It's here to here to here to here to here to here, and then eventually get up there, right? Like accumulation of tons of little steps that lead to those big steps. You want to take that giant leap, but you're not willing to take those little baby steps. That's how the big things get done. So as soon as you set a goal for yourself, as soon as you say, I wish I could do this, Get that out of your vocabulary and start doing. Try as fast as you can. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what are you gonna try today? What big thing do you have in mind and how can you break it down to try it on a small scale and do something with the resources you have today? Leave it in the comments below. I'm gonna join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.
