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497 sats \ 3 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 22 Jan \ parent \ on: How to Fail mostly_harmless
A fun thought experiment on SN is to have everyone live list their failures in a day to normalize that we all fail all the time. Now I'm trying to think about how my last failure was probably not the last and I've got hundreds more recent than that lol.
There's a chance that it's not failures that define anything but rather forming your life around trying a ton of things with a specific percentage chance. If you took an action that took one year and had a 60% success rate at something huge, vs something that took a day and had a 1% success rate as something huge, the ones that take the smallest amount of time, thus a person makes the most amount of failures, is more about what defines eventual success.
I think about this a lot when it comes to MVPs in a startup.
If you took an action that took one year and had a 60% success rate at something huge, vs something that took a day and had a 1% success rate as something huge
This is really interesting actually. Let's say "something huge" has the exact same payoff in each case. If every day I take the 1% chance, I'd yield something huge in 100 days on average. If I take the 60% chance, 2 years on average.
I think about this a lot when it comes to MVPs in a startup.
There's definitely an optimum percent chance vs time spent proving it out. For shipping the MVP of a product from scratch, I'd say 4-8 weeks. For shipping the MVP of a major feature 2-4 weeks.
I started thinking about things this way after reading about Pieter Levels doing 12 startups in 12 months. He ended up with a hit in 4-5 months with nomadlist.
An independent source of validation that This is the Way is this quantity vs quality parable.
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I love that parable. It's probably not 100% true for everything, but for creative production, in my experience, it is 100% true. I have lived it and seen others who have lived it longer, better, and it stays true and the returns keep getting bigger.
And yet there is this insidious force that, in many cases, pushes us back from this. It is bonkers to contemplate. I have lived that part, too.
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I had a friend who was very busy, very smart, very doing all kinds of things: web development, linux servers, code, wood work, music instrument builds, cooking and keeping his house always clean. I said, "How do you do all of this stuff and I never see you spend a lot of time cleaning but your home is always clean?"
Philip answered, " I always clean up 25% percent every day."
He was that smart. Much smarter than I was. Spending time with more experienced failures is truly a wise decision. The difference in discrimination and wisdom is don't spend time with people who have given up because they don't want to fail. I've been that person. It sucks. It's the best way to work hard at doing nothing.
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