When you should and shouldn't worry about failing

Unsystematic failures can also help you calibrate the right approach to the specific tradeoff between effort and accuracy. If you fail occasionally, you’re probably hitting the right balance. If you fail too often, you’re probably not putting in enough effort. If you never fail, then chances are you are spending too much time on most of your projects, because in general, the longer you work on a project, the better it gets. By polishing a particular project to a high gloss, you’re giving yourself less time for other things that require your attention. The trick is to figure out how much effort is enough for each project, so that over time, you manage to take care of most of the things you need to do and do them well enough.

 

The thing you really need to watch out for is systematic failure.

 

Systematic failure happens when there’s a particular goal you want to achieve, but never get to.

 

Maybe it’s a major achievement, like writing a book or applying for a fellowship. It could be an important daily goal, like exercising or eating healthier.

 

No matter what it is, the causes of systematic failures usually boil down to some combination of these three factors:

 

1. Short-term pressures versus long-term goals. This is the most obvious culprit. Most of us are drawn to achieve pressing short-term goals rather than put time into long-term projects. Lots of research suggests that our brains are wired to prefer tasks that pay off in the short-term rather than those whose benefit is long-term.

 

For example, many people have told me that they would like to write a book, but have never managed to do it. The reason for this failure is that there are always other tasks that require their attention in the moment, and so they fail to make progress on the book.

 

The people who do manage to accomplish their long-term goals create regular space to make progress on them. For example, almost everyone I know who has completed a book (without hiring a ghost-writer, that is) has devoted blocks of time each week to writing.

 

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