Failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.

Issue #233 of the Better Humans Daily. Subscribe here for inspiration and knowledge.

If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down. ~ Mary Pickford

#1. Mean time to recovery.

A lot of concepts are generalizable and mean time to recovery is one of them.

I first heard it in terms of running web services. Programmers make mistakes and these services then have downtime.

When this happens and you react by trying to prevent it from ever happening again, then you are focused on mean time to failure. You want the gap between failures to be as long as possible, maybe even years.

But in practice, trying to never fail often leads to simultaneously never succeeding. You basically stagnate trying to prevent every failure scenario you could ever think of.

Alternatively, if you react to a failure by trying to find ways to minimize the damage and then reverse the failure quickly, then you are focused on mean time to recovery. You’re basically saying it’s safe to fail because you recover so quickly. In practice, this makes it easy to move fast and get things done.

This has applications to habits, right? When you hear about “don’t break the chain” you are thinking in terms of never failing. But is there a way to flip your mindset?

#2. Slip, lapse, reform.

Having words for things makes them easier to identify, so I was happy to hear some of the new-ish language coming out of the Tiny Habits community.

If you have a habit started but then miss one or two days, then you have a slip. If you miss a week or two, then you have a lapse. If you slip, then just restart. But if you have a lapse, then you need to reform the habit with revised plans.

#3. More Codex-type advice.

I added Kevin Kelly’s 103 bits of advice I wish I had known to the canonical list of Codexes. He doesn’t label it as such, but it’s essentially his own book of wisdom, accumulated through 70 very productive years.

Notably, he is very clear about the value of rest to all that productivity (he was the founding editor of Wired):

Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.

Tips or feedback? Send me a response on Twitter.