Fail Fast
Deliberately allocating budget and time for experiments — accepting small failures quickly to find what actually works before committing large resources.
Why this habit matters
- Cognition: Deliberate experimentation is the fastest known path to expertise — the person who has run 100 experiments in a domain knows things that cannot be acquired from any other source.
- Financial: Small cheap failures consistently outperform large expensive ones — the business that runs five $10,000 experiments and fails three of them spends less and learns more than the business that runs one $50,000 initiative that fails.
- Mental health: Deliberately planning for failure removes the psychological sting of unexpected failure — when failure is designed in advance as a research outcome rather than a personal catastrophe, its emotional impact reduces dramatically.