The Architecture of Success is Failure

The biggest lesson I had to learn was how to fail faster… That’s why when I left Xerox at five o’clock, I would go up the street to the nonprofit charity, helping homeless kids, and I would dial for donations at night. I had a goal every night of getting rejected thirty times. The more I increased my failure rate, the more success I had at Xerox.

-Robert Kiyosaki in The Education of Millionaires by Michael Ellsberg

Thirty rejections a day! Thirty!

I do a large amount of reading, and cannot remember the last time I read something so completely stunning.

Not the fact that he failed 30 times, but that he went out with a goal of coming home with at least 30 failures.

I suppose the biggest successes are built, often on a mountain of failure. Before Microsoft, Bill Gates started a data company that went nowhere. Before Twitter Evan Williams, started a podcasting platform that was crushed by iTunes.

The concept of failing faster goes hand-in-hand with lean startup theory: fail fast, fail cheap, move on to the next idea.

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