Hurry up and fail
About five years ago I heard a podcast interview with Tim Kennedy, a former professional athlete and now television host, producer, and entrepreneur. In that interview he shared a mantra that has animated his diverse and accomplished career: Hurry up and fail.
I found the phrase weirdly inspiring, and I’ve repeatedly come back to it ever since. The mantra is ostensibly defeatist. It seems to take disappointment as a given. But when you stop to think about its deeper meaning, I believe you can find at least four motivating dimensions:
1) We are in a continuous state of becoming
The most galvanizing pursuits in life are approximations, not destinations. If they were destinations, we would be bored upon arrival. Such goals wouldn’t warrant our maximum toil and attention. Failures are easier to accept when they are nested in a broader story of perpetual striving.
2) Missteps and face-plants are par for the course
Failure is an unavoidable feature of the lifelong pursuit of a worthy ideal. Failure is proof of progress, not a reason to relinquish the struggle. That is because progress depends on serialized error correction. The more mistakes, the more learning, the more growth.
3) Speed matters to the journey
Insofar as failure is inevitable, it should be accelerated. We might as well get the mistakes over with, so we can absorb the key lessons and move on. Fear of failure inhibits our learning and development. Hastening failure expands our range of discovery and advancement.
4) Self-belief keeps us going
Many failures stem from the limits of our judgment, not necessarily from the limits of our ability. Reality is profoundly complex, and even the smartest people choose the wrong path. These mistakes are easier to embrace when we’re confident in our capacity to recover from them. We should always be humble, but forever hopeful.
Hurry up and fail.