Comments on: You Can’t Always Separate Wins From Losses

By: Scott H Young » Friday Links 09-05-01

Scott H Young » Friday Links 09-05-01 — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:01:18 +0000

[...] You Can’t Always Separate Wins from Losses -Double your success rate by doubling your failure rate. [...]

By: graham

graham — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:10:01 +0000

Hey Scott, for anyone keeping score, this is a solid post! But who’s counting?

Seriously, great one… It can be so easy to forget that it’s really just a numbers game… If you want to score more, you probably just need to take more shots. Perfectionism really can be such a self-limiting tendency. Many business mantras stress “failing fast” and “failing often” as keys to eventual success. I’ve also heard it said, if you’re not failing, you’re probably not really trying yet!

Anyway, cliches aside here, you’ve provided a great reminder of what the game’s really about. Good job.

By: Diego

Diego — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:19:18 +0000

I needed this reminder. Thank you.

By: Scott Young

Scott Young — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:57:40 +0000

Sara,

No it isn’t easy, and there will be a tendency to judge your win %, even if you try not to. But if you have the right attitude, I think you can lower it, to a degree.

-Scott

By: Sara

Sara — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:06:31 +0000

I’ll be honest, I’m torn on this. I agree in theory, but in practice, it’s pretty hard to accept doing less than your best. But there are lots of areas in life that are pure numbers games, where this strategy will win every time.

I think you’ve got a great point in that we don’t have to let ourselves be defined by our failures, or even our just “eh” performances. We don’t have to let them hold us back from doing awesome things.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:04:08 +0000

I found a similar philosophy helped me get over my inexperience and shyness with women. I hope you’re fine with me going down this road in your comments thread!

The obvious thing is to relate it to how meeting women is a numbers game and you can’t let your screw ups get you down, etc etc etc

How I thought of it more though is say you want to do something, like work up the courage to ask a girl out, or go up and talk to someone at a bar, and have tried ten times so far. You blew the first nine and finally succeed on the tenth.

It’s easy to be full of regret and berate yourself for the all times you screwed up, but in hindsight you needed those failures to get that final success.

In trying to reach your goal, it seems like a situation where you either did it or you didn’t, but it may have been the first time you totally blew it and got 0% of the way their. On the second you still screwed up overall, but were 10% of the way. On the 9th time you were 90% of the way. As bad as those missteps were at the time, they were helping you pave the way for eventually getting it right. If you avoided them, you never would have built up your competency behind the scenes.

By: Shanel Yang

Shanel Yang — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:54:18 +0000

Very well done! If your “not so great” help you turn out stuff as top quality as this, I can certainly see the benefit of them. I’m inspired to start letting go even what remains of the old absolute perfectionism that used to plague me. Sometimes I wonder how much I can let go and still turn out any quality product at all, but I’m going to trust your advice and my instincts on this, too. Thanks for the great insights!

By: Brian Maxwell

Brian Maxwell — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:26:43 +0000

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By: Kali

Kali — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:52:07 +0000

Great post, Scott. I liked your wording “Just add up the total wins and ignore the amount of attempts” because implementing this attitude avoids the plague of conditional acceptance and makes room for letting go.

By: Anand Dhillon

Anand Dhillon — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:42:05 +0000

Good post Scott. I`d also like to add that we often learn just as much from the losses as we do from the wins. A bad day in the gym can teach you that you are overtraining, for example, and need to reduce your frequency or take a week off.