f*ck ups

a bit of a rant. “Failure isn’t just acceptable—it’s required. If things aren’t failing, you’re not innovating enough. An episode like ‘Fck Ups’* gets one important thing right: people are too afraid of being wrong. That fear slows everything down—careers, companies, entire industries. But I’d push it further. It’s not just about accepting mistakes or feeling better about them. It’s about engineering your life so that you fail fast and iterate quickly. When we were building SpaceX, rockets exploded. Multiple times. That wasn’t a motivational lesson—it was data. Each failure improved the next design. Same with Tesla—production problems, near-bankruptcy, constant errors. But each one refined the system. Most people make the mistake of treating failure as emotional. It’s not. It’s informational. So the episode is directionally correct, but maybe too soft. The goal isn’t just to cope with mistakes—it’s to seek out the kinds of challenges where failure teaches you something valuable. If your mistakes aren’t increasing the probability of success in the future, then they’re just noise. And one more thing: don’t aim to avoid ‘f*ck ups.’ Aim to make better, more ambitious ones.”