I’ve made a large number of mistakes in my life.  My goal when I make a mistake is to understand what I did wrong, learn from it, pick myself up, and move forward.  When I’ve made the same mistake for the third time, I usually finally figure out what I’m doing wrong.

While I’ve also had plenty of success, I never get confused about where most of my lessons come from.  In case this is ever ambiguous from my writing, I learn the vast majority of my lessons from my failures.  I also have learned what I don’t know, and have figured out that I shouldn’t venture into areas where I’m clueless unless I am willing to spend a lot of time up front researching them – at least to the point where I’m no longer completely clueless.

Matt McCall points us to a great essay by James Montier from Societe General titled Mind Matters: An admission of ignorance; a humble approach to investing.  I thought it was right on and was nicely reinforced by Matt’s very personal post titled Ignorance and Humility.

Alex Muse has a long, detailed post up about How [He] lost $20,000,000+ in 18 months.  It’s the story of his experience with LayerOne – the first version and the second version.  It’s a useful story on failure that harkens back to 2001 with a nice redemption twist at the end.

It’s unusual for a founder to write a long thoughtful post on the failure of his company.  Roger Ehrenberg – the co-founder of Monitor110 – which shut down earlier this week, did just that on his outstanding post titled Monitor110: A Post Mortem.  The post is oriented around Roger’s "seven deadly sins":

1. The lack of a single, "the buck stops here" leader until too late in the game
2. No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
3. Too much PR, too early
4. Too much money
5. Not close enough to the customer
6. Slow to adapt to market reality
7. Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board

Every person in every company that I’m involved with should read this post carefully.  Every entrepreneur should also.  Failure is part of the entrepreneur experience – Roger has done us all a great service by being willing to be deeply introspective and share his thoughts on what went wrong at Monitor110 in such a direct way.

A reader (thanks Austin) sent me two great failure links today.  The first is from BoingBoing and is titled J.K. Rowling on the power of failure.  It’s an excellent short segment from her excellent Harvard Commencement Address titled The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.

The next is a sign made entirely out of push pins that says "Fail Harder".

I spent the afternoon at TechStars meeting with five of the ten teams.  They are all dynamite, although some of them will fail at their current incarnation.  Just remember – fail hard, fast, and then get up and try again. 

Great, inspiring video on failure.

(thanks Scott).