Samuel West
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
My name is Samuel West. I'm a psychologist and I'm a curator. He is a curator and founder of the Museum of Failure. And? And how did that come to be? So I was in Croatia, in Zagreb, the capital, just on holiday with my family. And I stumbled into a museum called the Museum of Broken Relationships.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
So I'd been thinking about ways to sort of spread the ideas of accepting failure and how much room for improvement there is on learning from failure. And then I was in Zagreb and I just got this, you know, what do you call it? Hallelujah moment.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
It's a sunny, nice day, and we're about to open in a few minutes.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
Here we have an example of failure at Museum of Failure. Our wall panels are falling off the wall. I'm going to kill somebody.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
Elizabeth Holmes, do I need to say anything about her? No, come on. Gerber, back in the 70s, they launched a product of adult food in a baby food jar. This is the Euroclub from 2008.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
It's a golf club with, yeah, it's for us men when we're out golfing and need to urinate. So what you do is you unscrew the top of it. You clip it onto your belt, and then you fiddle under the belt, and you urinate into this canister camouflaged as a golf club. And then you screw it back up, and you continue on with your golf.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
I mean, the criteria is that to be in a museum, it has to be an innovation, and it has to be a failure, obviously. And then I have to find it interesting.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
So the focus at the museum is on innovations, which is products and services, but in our personal lives we fail also, and the same principle applies there. We're very bad at learning from our own failures because it's uncomfortable. So if we're willing to have those uncomfortable feelings and thoughts for a while, we can actually learn from them.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
I want people to feel liberated that failing isn't as bad as you think it is, usually.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
I think failure is far more interesting than success. Because why? Because success is often sort of curated by whoever, whatever story the sender wants to present. Whereas failure feels much more authentic, much more human. Do you think it's easier to learn from failure or from success? I think it maybe feels better to learn from success, but I think we can learn much more from failure.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
It's a more natural way of learning. That's how we learn how to eat, how to walk, how to do anything is through a repeated trial and error. So here's the thing.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
What's wrong with that idea? There's nothing wrong with it. It's just really difficult to do. And the thing is, it's really low effort learning because sometimes, you know, listening to that successful entrepreneur or listening to that successful artist, you think you're just going to absorb the success by listening to the story.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
Just because something works for someone else doesn't mean it's going to work for you.
Freakonomics Radio
How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)
And whether failure needs a museum. We have a Ford Edsel. We have Pepsi Crystal. New Coke.