Embracing Failure
The power of fallibility
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Friends,
In the journey of life, we all walk a path laden with decisions that sometimes lead us astray. The wise understand that these missteps are not failures, but rather pivotal moments on the road to success. The key distinction lies in how one approaches these inevitable mistakes.
Everyone makes mistakes; it's an inescapable facet of our human existence. However, the true separation between success and mediocrity lies in the way we respond to them. Successful individuals are astute learners of their mistakes, while many tend to ignore or downplay them. I think failure is good. It helps us grow - so that we eventually succeed.
Embracing one's mistakes, rather than shunning them, is a powerful tool for growth. A year's hindsight should reveal a past self that appears rather naive and inexperienced. If it doesn't, the lessons have been missed. Few actively seek out their mistakes, but they need not fear them.
Intelligent individuals who humbly embrace their mistakes and weaknesses invariably outperform their peers. Their egos do not serve as insurmountable barriers, and they march forward, strengthened by their errors. It is in this embrace of fallibility that true wisdom and progress reside, for mistakes are but the stepping stones towards greatness.
I want to cite an example. Last year I recommended a great product for you all - one that I still use daily to read my news - Artifact - and created by the Instagram founder Kevin Systrom. This week they announced their intention to close the business - “We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.” The way that this is positioned is very much positioned as a learning experience. It must have been a difficult decision, to accept failure. But it is what it is - and that’s no bad thing.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
PS. I’ve enjoyed reading a bunch of the reports (I think I’m done!) predicting 2024 - many review their predictions for the previous years - just another way to show that it’s ok to be wrong!
Here are my recommendations for this week:
Now
Is 2024 already feeling overwhelming? These are the handful of reports to uplevel your January. Great material for any aspiring game changers, leaders, entrepreneurs, strategy leads, investors, MBA students ....or anyone with a curious mind. Also 50 Themes for 2025
Are smartphones bad for us? Despite their sudden ubiquity, there’s still a lot we don’t know about how our smartphones are affecting us. Are they alienating people from each other, or helping them to connect with others? Do they affect children differently than adults? And how do we step away from our phones if our whole lives are on them? There isn’t a broad consensus as of yet; different studio es draw different conclusions. To attempt to capture the current state of the discussion surrounding smartphones, we spoke to five experts.
The 7 Keys to Longevity: How’s your dry January? Most aging experts are skeptical that these actions will meaningfully extend the upper limits of the human life span. What they do believe is that by practising a few simple behaviours, many people can live healthier for longer, reaching 80, 90 and even 100 in good physical and mental shape. The interventions just aren’t as exotic as transfusing yourself with a young person’s blood. Or maybe you’re popping some NMN?
Global Risks Report 2024 (from the World Economic Forum): The Global Risks Report explores some of the most severe risks we may face over the next decade, against a backdrop of rapid technological change, economic uncertainty, a warming planet and conflict. As cooperation comes under pressure, weakened economies and societies may only require the smallest shock to edge past the tipping point of resilience.
Tired? Distracted? Burned Out?: Attention is the most important human faculty. Your life, after all, is just the sum total of the things you’ve paid attention to. And we lament our attention issues all the time: how distracted we are, how drained we feel, how hard it is to stay focused or present. And yet, while there’s no shortage of advice on how to improve our sleep hygiene, or spending, or physical fitness, there’s hardly any good information about how to build and replenish our capacity for paying attention.
Next
OpenAI’s New App Store Could Turn ChatGPT Into an Everything App: The GPT Store, as it’s called, is available to those with a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 per month, and users of the business plans ChatGPT Team and Enterprise, which cost anywhere from $25 to thousands of dollars per user per month. Users of free ChatGPT won’t be able to access the “apps” for now.
OpenAI calls these apps GPTs. By some measures they are already popular: OpenAI claims that more than 3 million users have created custom versions of ChatGPT since it became possible in November. They are likely to multiply even faster now that pretty much anyone can create and publish a GPT on the web, after verifying their profile by making their name visible or linking it to a legitimate website. Also: Get Ready for the Great AI Disappointment
How much detail is too much? Midjourney v6 attempts to find out: As Midjourney rolls out new features, it continues to make some artists furious.
Will Chatbots Teach Your Children? New A.I. tools could enable a Silicon Valley dream: bots that customize learning for pupils. Prior attempts have not lived up to the hype.
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024: Every year, the reporters and editors at MIT Technology Review survey the tech landscape and pick 10 technologies that we think have the greatest potential to change our lives in the years ahead. We consider advances in every field, from biotechnology and artificial intelligence to computing, robotics, and climate tech. Also: what didn’t make the cut? + Techno Optimism for 2024.
OpenAI’s custom GPT Store is now open for business: The store brings more potential use cases to ChatGPT and expands OpenAI’s ecosystem beyond what the company builds for customers. Since announcing the GPT Builder program in November, OpenAI said more than 3 million bots — called GPTs — have been created by users. Also: AI girlfriend bots are already flooding OpenAI’s GPT store
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