Deliberate Failure: How To Grow At Super Speed

It is common to fear failure the most in life. Failure is in many ways terrifying. Academically. Professionally. Relationally. Even personally, it is something we seldom want to experience. The majority will do everything they can to escape or postpone failure as much as possible. Thing is, nobody can escape the loop. When we are not ready for failure, it makes us crumble. Everything suddenly makes no sense. Practicing failure deliberately shields us from that moment of sudden uncertainty.

It means trying out new things. Encountering that hardship. Looking stupid. Slipping and falling on the ice. Purposefully situating yourself where you are filled with doubt more than anything else. You learn valuable lessons here. More than anywhere else. The majority of us wait for these adversities to visit us. However, who told you you cannot deliberately seek them out? By making mistakes on purpose, you get the knowledge to more easily overcome future obstacles. When you screw up and fail, you learn how not to handle things. That’s the magic.

Failing is part of every successful story. Practicing failure is thus the deliberate act of engaging in situations where we are likely to fail. To build skill. To become more resilient. To adapt before the going gets rough. Failure is the art of falling down a certain way, getting up, and not slipping on those grounds again. There are only so many ways to fall. The more you master, the better you get at handling what life throws at you. Things often don’t go as you wish. So if you want to avoid costly mistakes in the future—when the stakes are high and the pressure is on—making some now is excellent preparation.

After all, chosen failure sounds a tad bit more manageable than adversity stacked on top of other life’s ebbs and flows. If you practice failing every so often, you increase your adaptability to the hurdles life places in your way. If you don’t practice failing, be careful when the sun doesn’t shine, okay? Your mission might collapse right then and there. You chose not to experiment under relatively controlled conditions. Now you face catastrophic consequences. The emotional impact, it’s great. The financial loss, it’s pressurizing. Unexpected failure is hard. Prepare.

Real life implications of practicing failure:

• Skill development: learning new skills always includes making mistakes. Embracing failure as part of the process empowers you to improve faster and more effectively. A musician could deliberately practice challenging pieces, knowing they will make errors but upskill on each attempt;

• Innovation: in creative fields, failure is the precedent of breakthroughs. Experimenting with unconventional ideas or approaches means, by definition, unexpected outcomes. Positive and negative outcomes. Thomas Edison famously created thousands of failed prototypes before inventing the bulb;

• Business: entrepreneurship inherently involves risks, and many ventures and ideas fail before finding success. Practice failure as a businessperson. Adapt and iterate. Startups often do this through A/B testing and minimum-viable products to test market fit and what works, knowing most of their initiatives will fail;

• Education: students who take on challenging material are viable to mistakes but ultimately learn more deeply than their counterparts. Elite language learners often practice speaking, knowing they’ll make countless grammatical errors but improve fluency every sentence;

• Personal: facing controlled failures in personal challenges—fitness, public speaking, meditation—builds courage and resilience. You might attempt fitness goals slightly above your ability, failing initially but achieving them through persistence;

• Crisis management: organizations use failure simulations, like fire drills or cybersecurity breach tests, to prepare for emergencies. A company could stage a mock data breach to identify vulnerabilities in its systems.

How you might use deliberate failure as a mental model: (1) create low-stakes scenarios, practicing failure in environments where mistakes will not have severe consequences—which could be a simulation, role-playing, or experimentation; (2) start small, beginning with manageable challenges before progressing to higher-risk scenarios—don’t bite more than you can chew; (3) reflect and analyze, asking what went wrong, why, and how you can do better next time; (4) iterate continuously, seeing failure as part of a feedback loop, adjusting based on the lessons you learn along the way; (5) embrace discomfort, leaning into situations that stretch your abilities as this is where growth happens—at the edge of competence, not within the zone of comfort.

Thought-provoking insights. Failure provides real-time feedback. You get to adjust and improve. Fast. Instantly, ideally. As paths and perspectives you would have taken long to uncover unveil themselves, plunge in. Reflect on what didn’t work. Don’t do that again. Then get up and try again. “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” and “The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.” both reveal the same, critical insight: mastery is achieved through countless failures and iterations. Through persistence and resilience in face of repeat failure. Struggle more now, enjoy the merits later.