“…What we call ‘talent’ generally comes from success, rather than the opposite.  A great deal of empiricism has been done on the subject, most notably by Art De Vany, an insightful and original thinker who single mindedly studied wild uncertainty in the movies.  He showed that, sadly, much of what we ascribe to skills is an after-the-fact attribution.  The movie makes the actor, he claims – and a large dose of nonlinear luck makes the movie.”

from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, pages 30-31

I’ve been reading the book The Black Swan.  It’s a very interesting book, but the above quotation really caught my eye.  I do think that “success” is largely based on circumstance and that people generally step into the role they’re given.  If much is expected, much will be returned.

From what I understand, something like this happens in the armed forces.  I have heard people say that you have no idea what you can do physically until you’re pushed to your limits.  Evidently the armed forces have a way of pushing people up to their limit, but not (usually) beyond.

Of course, what the book is talking is as much about fame and social standing as it is actual skill.  But I like the idea.  If I am put in a place, with the right motivations (I don’t like to fail, I have some reward, etc), I will generally succeed.  And looking back, people will say “see, Philip was the right person for that job, no one else could have done it.”  When in reality, my ability to do the task probably hinged on my being assigned the task and my own motivations rather than my actual skill level.  There are many people with adequate skill – just not many with the same opportunity.

However, once given that opportunity, and that success, I think some of the skill then becomes legitimate.  For instance, only a handful of players in the NBA have played in the Finals.  By circumstance, they have an advantage over everyone else.  But that experience has made them better as well.

This is all very interesting.  Ultimately my faith plays in at some point, but I won’t get into the details now.  Generally though, it is best to look to acquire the skills of your peers and above, but also to hunt for opportunities.  The two together seems to breed success.

In order to succeed you must take risk.  If you take risks, you’re going to fail.  The question is not if you’ll fail at some point in your life, but when?  And when you fail, what will you do?

Over and over I hear this concept from great men and women in business and in life.  The most successful are always the ones that have endured failure and still kept going.  But I would also say, the fastest to success are the quickest to recognize failure.  Speed of iteration is really important, not just the fact that you do iterate.

I listened to a talk recently that basically said this: “If you have an idea, identify the failure points as best you can.  Once you’ve identified those points, get to those points as soon as you can – because if you can overcome those your idea will work.  If you can’t overcome those points, your idea will not work.  And the faster you know your idea won’t work, the quicker you can move on to the next idea.”

If we were being honest most of us would be forced to admit that we run from failure.  We try to ignore the ways in which a thing will not work out because we all want to be successful.  But the most successful people don’t avoid failure, they just fail more quickly.  They don’t hold on to the things that won’t work, they move on quickly to the next idea.

Think of it this way: Let’s say 1 in 20 ideas succeed.  The problem is, you don’t know whether it’s number 1, 17 or 20.  So the quicker you try the first and figure out if it will fail, the quicker you can move on to the next idea.  And if that great idea is number 15, the first person to 15 wins.  The first person to chalk all those ideas up as failures, admit they were wrong, show some humility and move on, wins.

So fail fast, fail often.  Learn to recognize the breaking points and test those as quickly as possible.  Be humble and admit when something doesn’t/won’t work.  Learn from your mistakes and know when to move on.  Thomas Edison, commenting on his light bulb experiments, said “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that do not work.”

Here are some interesting talks having to do with risk and failure.  All of these are from Stanford:

Tom Kelly

Judy Estrin

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