Ever heard of the Fire Phone?
Most people haven’t because it was a spectacular failure.
Amazon’s $199 smartphone launched in 2014 to take on Apple’s iPhone.
Cut to a year later and the Fire phone had crashed and burned, permanently pulled from stores.
So Bezos had to address the world. A lot of CEOs would hedge, papering over it with something like:
“We’re working closely with our executive teams to analyze the root cause of this unsatisfactory product rollout, and to ensure that future launches are guided by a more holistic approach that takes into account all stakeholder needs – especially those of our valued customers.”
Wishy-washy, borderline nonsensical fluff. He said nothing of the sort.
What he actually said was: “If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now – and I am not kidding. Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.”
Quite the difference, eh?
Here we see Bezos (and the Amazon culture in his wake) not hedging, but embracing failure. Not because they’re masochists, not because they’re victims, but because THEY KNOW it’s just the price you need to pay occasionally if you ever hope to achieve long term triumph.
Which is why they make lots of bets. Most fail. But “a small number of winners,” like Prime or AWS, “pay for dozens, hundreds of failures.”
This is Edison, struggling to find the winning filament, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Or inventor, Percy Spencer’s failed radar experiment that melted the chocolate bar in his pocket and gave the world the microwave.
There’s a word for this and it’s not being “resilient” in the face of failure, it’s antifragility. Where you get stronger because of it.
The great thing is once you learn this (and we mean really internalize it and accept it), something shifts. You start getting very grateful for all your failures, large or small.
“I’m glad I got fired – I never would have founded my company”
“I’m glad I never got into Harvard – I never would have met my husband at UCLA”
“I’m glad I got sick – I never would have stopped.”
To say these things and actually mean it, means you’ve already processed it and have come out better because of it.
Maybe this Thanksgiving weekend, forget the usual gratitude. Try the harder kind.
Reflect on the less obvious blessings. The ones that pissed you off or gutted you. The things we didn’t see coming and never wanted to begin with. The kind that didn’t seem so blessed at the time, but somehow turned out to be the making of you.
Funny how life works. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
