Failure itself is not a virtue - just a fact of life. It's what you do with 
that failure that counts:

http://blogs.hbr.org/2007/06/learning-from-success-and-fail/

Cheers,

Matt

> On Jun 15, 2014, at 12:32 PM, Alex North <a...@alexn.id.au> wrote:
> 
> Very interesting, thanks Geoff. Particularly the actual data point that past 
> failure didn't improve chances of future success. If evidence accrues for 
> that it should change the impact calculations for demonstrated-mediocre 
> entrepreneurs. But what's the background failure rate? 80% doesn't seem that 
> high anyway.
> 
> 
>> On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 1:22 PM, Geoff Langdale <geoff.langd...@gmail.com> 
>> wrote:
>> Interesting tidbits, here:
>> 
>> http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2014/05/19/140519ta_talk_surowiecki
>> 
>>> On top of this, there’s a widespread tendency to treat failure as a badge 
>>> of honor: “Fail fast, fail often” is a familiar mantra in Silicon Valley. 
>>> There’s now a regular FailCon, where people come to hear other 
>>> entrepreneurs tell about the hard times they endured and about how starting 
>>> a business and failing actually makes you more likely to succeed in the 
>>> future. It’s a comforting message, but the evidence suggests that past 
>>> failure really just predicts future failure. A 2009 study of venture-backed 
>>> firms found that entrepreneurs who had failed in the past were not much 
>>> more likely to succeed in new ventures than first-time entrepreneurs 
>>> were—some eighty per cent of those who had failed before failed again. A 
>>> later study of more than eight thousand German ventures came to an even 
>>> grimmer conclusion: founders who had previously failed were more likely to 
>>> fail than novices.
>> 
>> Some interesting stuff in the article about overconfidence, too - worth 
>> considering in the light of the recent thread about founders and depression: 
>> 
>>> And that’s because the fundamental characteristic of entrepreneurs isn’t 
>>> risk-seeking; it’s self-confidence. A 1997 study in the Journal of Business 
>>> Venturing found that entrepreneurs are overconfident about their ability to 
>>> prevent bad outcomes. They’re also overconfident about the prospects of 
>>> their business. A 1988 study in the same journal of some three thousand 
>>> entrepreneurs found that eighty-one per cent thought their businesses had 
>>> at least a seventy-per-cent chance of success, and a third thought there 
>>> was no chance they would fail—numbers that bear no relation to reality. A 
>>> recent paper called “Living Forever” notes that entrepreneurs are more 
>>> likely than other people to overestimate their life spans.
>> 
>> No citations as it's just a talk piece. Not sure I buy it but an interesting 
>> perspective nonetheless.
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