It seems 37signals is running out of things to be contrarian about. It is easy to "invert" a saying like "learn from your failures" and make it seem profound but that doesn't make it any more valuable or useful. It is easy to learn from success as it generally carries momentum and begets even more success. Learning from failure is hard because it tends to cause people to give up altogether, requiring those who have experienced it to either stay optimistic and cull important lessons from it, or to simply go home defeated.
On the flip side, I imagine failure is much more common than success. So even if there is less to learn and its harder, there's many more opportunities to be had.
The problem with looking at success is it's hard to separate what happened to work once from what is a good idea. You can go to Las Vegas bet everything you own on one hand / spin / roll of the dice and win, but it's not a good idea. However, looking at the people that lost everything at Las Vegas is a different story.
Totally agree on this one ... anything can be said about vague things like this topic, for and against, but whatever you do, always try to learn, from your mistakes or from your successes.
"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve." Alan Perlis, "Epigrams in Programming" (#101) http://www.cs.yale.edu/quotes.html
You always learn from all types of experience. Of course you won't just learn how to do something by doing it wrong many times, but the reason for the "cultural fascination with failure" is that if you don't try you don't succeed, and if you do try but fail, should we say "well, you did it wrong?". No, learning from failure is an optimistic way to see failure, and it's perfectly fine.
The post is a bit ridiculous.
I'd say that learning from failure is the only way to really learn. Scratch anybody that's successful in business and all but a very lucky few of them will have 'failed' at some point or other.
You wouldn't be able to walk if you didn't 'learn from failure', it's our nature, pure & simple.
As children, we know that walking has inherent value. Edison learned many different ways to not make a light bulb, but he knew that it was a great feat if he could just get it right.
My struggle sometimes seems to be knowing what direction to start going in, no matter how many times I fall or filaments I vaporize.
I certainly know several ways to make a web site that no one will visit. :-)
The biggest deal about a culture that gratuitously accepts failure, is that people become less afraid to fail. Therefore, they are more willing to take risks.
The article wouldn't have its swarmy "contrarian" quality if they called it "learn from your successes ALSO". That's good advice. Indeed, the changes are your failures are things you're not so good at and your successes have been things your good at. Improving the things you're already good might just be a way of becoming great. Cool thought but we didn't need that "contrarian" bit.
