In recent years, there’s been a growing obsession with failure. The “fail fast, fail often” mentality is polarizing. Many take it at face value and use it to romanticize their own failures. Others reject this as bad advice that’s intended only to soothe us in our shortcomings.

But regardless of where you stand, there remains an important lesson at the core of this mindset. And it’s not about failure, it’s about reach. If you’re willing to risk failure, you’re able to take more chances and reach further beyond your current ability level.

The goal is never failure itself. And that’s what most people get wrong. The goal is extending your reach and accelerating growth. This requires pursuing opportunities where failure is a potential outcome. Progress is difficult to come by when you limit yourself to situations where success and participation trophies are guaranteed outcomes.

“There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn.”

— Robert Greene

Avoiding contests that you’re not capable of winning makes sense in high-stakes situations. You want to eliminate risk and play the odds. But in modern life, success is rarely a matter of life and death. Most decisions aren’t catastrophic or irreversible.

It’s still important to choose the right opportunities where you have a competitive advantage in terms of your natural abilities or interests. But if you want to accelerate growth in these areas, you have to seek out challenges that test your limits and push you to the brink of your ability level.

Aiming 4% beyond your current abilities

Habit expert and best-selling author, James Clear, suggests a good rule of thumb is to aim 4% beyond your current ability level. This is where deliberate practice takes place and you’re able to achieve a state of flow.

Don’t get too hung up on the exact percentage, this is just a system to calculate risk and accelerate growth. If you’re aiming 4% beyond your current ability level, failure is a potential outcome. But it’s not the only available outcome – success is still within reach. This allows you to take advantage of inflection points and make bigger leaps – in your career, your art, or personal qualities you’re focused on improving.

Ramit Sethi, best-selling finance author, has a similar approach where he keeps a tag in Gmail for “failures” and aims to reach four failures each month. But that doesn’t mean he’s taking stupid risks. He’s making calculated moves to extend his reach and give himself a chance. Sethi knows failure is a natural part of growing and trying new things. This mindset is key to the sustained growth of his business, helping him reach 400,000 newsletter subscribers and launch dozens of successful (and failed) products.

Discovering the terrain

Both success and failure offer an equal sense of the terrain. Each reveals what to do more of, less of, and which direction might be worth exploring. When you’re just starting out, the map is obscured with certain parts missing. With each success and each failure, you learn a little more and reveal another piece of the map.

“The only way to win is to learn faster than everyone else.”

— Wade Shearer

Knowing what not to do can be just as powerful as knowing what to do. If you can avoid repeating small mistakes more than once, and avoid the colossal ones altogether, you can bring the full picture into focus, faster. Reflection on your own experiences, paired with vicarious learning (e.g., books or podcasts), helps commit experience into knowledge, shedding light on new corners of the map.

Learning fast, learning often

The driving force behind this fascination with failure is learning, which leads to growth. “Learn fast, learn often” is a more accurate but less buzzworthy rallying cry. Failure is just a mask that learning wears on occasion.

Learning is what you’re really after. Figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and piecing together your understanding of life. With this you can build momentum in the areas you’ve prioritized.

The “fail fast” mentality is about making calculated efforts to push your limits. But failure itself is not the goal. The goal is to push your limits, extend your reach, and develop yourself. Growth requires putting yourself in challenging situations that test your abilities.

If nothing else, the romanticized advice surrounding failure should serve as a reminder that you’re the one who has to go out and live. Books, podcasts, and articles can provide you with strategies, systems, and kindred souls. But at the end of the day, if you want to grow, you have to test these ideas for yourself, risk failure, and fine-tune your own strategy along the way.

What you don’t see when you look at the synopsis of great people’s lives are the times they fell short. From the outside, it looks like they operated with invincibility, rising up at each pivotal moment. When the stakes were at their highest, there was no stumble.

But when you dig into the details, there’s no one who has actually achieved this. Top performers assume more risk than others. They’re on the frontier, operating at the edge of their current abilities. If anything, this means failure is even more prevalent.

Failing to rise to the occasion

The truth is, there will be moments when you fail to rise to the occasion. You’re not always going to make the right decisions or act exactly how you imagined. And since perfection is impossible, what matters most is the ability to bounce back.

Even Warren Buffett had moments when he failed to follow through early in his life. At the beginning of his career, Buffett was terrified of public speaking. And while you might imagine that someone like Buffett stepped up, put himself through deliberate practice, and overcame the fear in one fell swoop — reality was much different.

In a widely-told story, at the beginning of his career, Buffett enrolled in a Dale Carnegie speaking course to improve his skills. But few sources include the fact that he quit the first time around. He was afraid of being called upon to speak so he dropped out of the class. It was only the second time around that he built the courage to follow through. Now Buffett credits this as the best $100 investment he’s ever made.

The ability to bounce back

Anyone can lecture you about decisions you should make, habits you should build, systems you should create. But the most successful people aren’t flawless in their decision making. They just have a remarkable ability to bounce back.

The greatest artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists take the misfortune in stride, turning obstacles on their end and using them as an opportunity to improve their craft. They embrace mistakes and capitalize on them, ensuring they never happen again. And that’s the real difference in top performers — they stumble, but they rarely repeat mistakes.

Whether you’re struggling against your internal limits — uncertainty, doubt, fear — or you’re facing external challenges, you’re going to have bad days. What matters is the ability to reflect, learn, and find the courage to start fresh the next day.

Awareness can go a long way when it comes to navigating failure and being kinder to yourself. It’s okay to hold yourself to your own high expectations, but expecting perfection will often lead you over the edge. Life is as much about resourcefulness and how you respond to challenging situations as it is carefully plotting a long-term strategy. You need both.

Professionals know this space well and embrace mistakes as learning cues. They learn from them, but they don’t obsess over them. Amateurs expect perfection and crumble when they fail to meet their own lofty expectations.

Failure is about reach

The goal is never failure itself. It’s the expansion of your reach and the rate of personal growth. That means pursuing opportunities where failure is a potential outcome. Not limiting yourself to situations where success and participation trophies are guaranteed outcomes.

If you’re willing to risk failure, you’ll take more chances and reach further beyond your current ability level. And this is the fastest way to learn and create more opportunities for accelerated growth. Take calculated risks.

There will be times that you surprise yourself. But there will also be times you fail to rise to the occasion. In those moments, what matters is your resilience and resourcefulness. The lean product mindset applies as well here as anywhere else. Build, measure, learn. Repeat.

What’s Really Behind Our Obsession with Failure