By Edward Yee
When talking to other USPians, you might notice that most of them have racked up much success and have much to share. Unfortunately for you, success was something I was never really good at and am in no position to talk about. Instead, I will write about a topic that I might have slightly more authority on – how to fail in life.
However, before that, it is appropriate for me to address two questions probably in your mind:
- Why I’ve been asked to write and;
- Why should you (or anyone else for that matter) read what I write?
If I were to guess an answer to the first question, it is because someone somewhere thinks I have something interesting to share. And like anyone who has a horse that can count to ten, this blog wants to showcase my “prowess” in counting. Now, obviously counting to ten is not much of a mathematical feat, but I guess much approval is to be expected, considering this performer is a horse.
As to the second question, why you should read what this horse writes when you have so many other (admittedly) better things to do, I could go about arguing that it is because I have managed the feat of failing multiple times in our education system, in volunteering and in trying to start a business. But I will not do that. Instead, I will quote Benjamin Franklin’s eighth and most important reason why you should pick an older mistress over a younger one – because I will be so grateful. And while I am pleading with you, I might as well ask that you bear with this old mistress as I am rather long-winded in my writing.
Now, if you are still with me, you might not know that there are many ways to fail in life. But today, with the benefit of hindsight (which is, after all, 20/20) and a lil’ inspiration from Charlie Munger, I will share my prescription for failure which seems to have worked best for me.
My first prescription is to learn everything you can from your own experience and at all costs; do not learn from the good and bad experiences of others – especially not the “giants” as mentioned by Sir Isaac Newton. A glimpse at humanity’s relationship with gambling and how many millions continue to lose their pants is a really good example of a path toward sweet misery. In fact, it would be even better to not learn from your experiences at all! After all, Albert Einstein said that the very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results – exactly the sort of failure and insanity we are striving for.
For those of you who might find it difficult to quit learning cold turkey, you could start with baby steps by first becoming a man with a hammer. There is an old saying: “To the man with a hammer, the world looks like a nail.” Most people are trained in just one discipline and as a result only see the world through that particular world view. Such people, having been trained to solve problems in one way, try to solve all problems with that hammer – an amazing way to fail in today’s world with all its complicated problems that require a multidisciplinary toolbox. If you look at the giants changing our world today, many of them are who they are because they were able to solve problems by seeing things differently and across disciplines. Take for example Elon Musk, the founder of Paypal, Tesla, Space X, and Solar City, all leading companies in the most diverse of fields. His willingness to continuously learn and understand each industry and take different perspectives towards the betterment of humanity has allowed him to, in the immortal words of Steve Jobs, push the human race forward. Unfortunately for us in USP, we have had some progress towards accumulating our multidisciplinary toolbox, leaving us at a disadvantage in our path towards failure. Guess you would just have to work harder in my next three prescriptions to compensate!
My second prescription for failure is when you fail at any point in your life, stay down and don’t get back up. Anyone, the lucky or wise, would be bound to face failures in their lives – staying down would guarantee that in due course, you would be surrounded by your own failures. The problem with so many successful people like Walt Disney, Thomas Edison or Jack Ma is that they simply do not give up. You probably are familiar with Thomas Edison’s popular quote of “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” What you might be less familiar with is the story of Jack Ma. Jack Ma experienced failure all his life and bounced back every time. He started off by failing the college entrance exam to the worst college in his province twice and was rejected from every job he applied to while he was unemployed. In fact, when KFC went to China for the first time, he was the only one to be dismissed out of the 24 who applied. He proceeded to start two internet companies with both failing horribly. Only after numerous other failures and his third try at starting a business was Alibaba formed and he became the success he is today. What we can learn from Jack Ma is that life throws us many opportunities to fail and as long as we just pick one of the many opportunities to give up can we easily achieve a life of failure.
The third prescription which I would like to share is to simply invert Albert Einstein’s advice and strive not to be of value but to be a success. After all, failure will never really be complete if we don’t throw in selfishness, greed and self-indulgent behaviour into the mix. Case in point, the face of greed during the 2008 financial meltdown, Bernie Madoff. Despite once being a renowned and respected financier who helped start the NASDAQ index, his greed and pride caused him to pull off the largest Ponzi scheme ever, cheating over 17 billion dollars of life savings from thousands of innocent Americans. What more can a failure ask for?
On the flipside, we have the Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus who started the microcredit movement through Grameen Bank, the largest and pioneer microfinance bank in the world. By giving poor women the seed funding necessary to become entrepreneurs, his work has created sustainable value and raised millions both in Bangladesh and around the world out of poverty. Today, he is on another mission to change the lives of the poor through the concept of social businesses. His organisation, the Yunus Centre, where I just happen to be at while writing this, has already started to impact hundreds of thousands through this idea. Kahlil Gibran, a famous writer once said: “They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold, and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.” Well, I definitely deem both of them mad – no failure should touch these people with a ten-foot pole.
My fourth and last prescription is to loathe hard work as much as you can. Considering the recent death of one boxing’s greatest legends, Muhammad Ali, it might be appropriate to quote John Maxwell who said: “Champions do not become champions in the ring – they are merely recognised there”. A boxing quote, it was meant to show that champions in the sport do not actually win the match through the effort they put during the competition but rather through the countless hours they had spent training prior to it. And if you think about it in Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule to become a world class expert, it makes sense that the true test of any champion, in practically any field, is the amount of hard work spent practicing. Herein lies the nugget of wisdom for us failures – call upon your inner sloth and don’t get anywhere close to that 10,000 hours of practice (I would recommend that you stay below 1,000 hours just to ensure a margin of safety).
This rounds up the end of my four quintessential prescriptions for failure in life. For those who want slightly more variety, two others which made the honour roll are “The Fear of Failure” and “Being Happy with the Status Quo”. You might want to try your hand at those after mastering the first four.
Signing off,
A fellow failure.
