Scott EmpringhamAI Marketing Strategist | Helping CEOs Scale with AI

How to OVERCOME fear of FAILURE forever!🤯 #successfulmindset #success #successtips

3 Oct 2022 · 1 min

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A short motivational YouTube talk by Scott Empringham (uploaded Oct 3, 2022) arguing that failure is essential to success. The speaker uses the spaghetti-and-marshmallow tower test (kindergarteners vs. parents/attorneys/engineers) to show children experiment rapidly, embrace failure, iterate, and therefore outperform adults who over-plan and fear failure. Two core takeaways: failure is a byproduct of success, and when you fail "well" you learn quickly and retry.

Chapters

If you want to succeed, you got to fail at a massive level. You got to be willing to fail over and over and over again. My favorite example of that is that spaghetti marshmallow test, where they take four groups of people. They take kindergarteners, attorneys, parents, and they take engineers, and they give them, like, 13 minutes. I mean, they give them marshmallows, spaghetti, and tape. And they say, in these 13 minutes, your job is to build the highest tower possible. The kids won every time. The engineers would take the first five minutes to talk about who was in charge. Then they'd take another five or ten minutes to figure out the plan. And then they take the last few minutes to try to actually execute on it. Then they would topple, and then they figure out the last 30 seconds trying to try to reach jigger, the whole thing. Parents, same thing. Attorneys, same thing. Kids just start mashing shit together. Everything's breaking. Everything's falling apart. The first five minutes are all experimentation, and the last three minutes are experimentation. But now they've got a tower. They've tried and failed, like, eight to ten times. By the time the 13 minutes is up, the engineers, the parents, and the attorneys, like, twice. So compare the two. Kids don't give a shit about failure. So two things. Number one, failure is a byproduct of success. Two, if you're failing good, learn something from it. Try again right away.