"Every strike brings me closer to the next Home Run." Babe Ruth.

What an amazingly positive attitude to 'failure'!

If, like me, you’re not really up on Baseball, a strike is when you miss the ball.  Babe Ruth put so much energy into each swing that from 1928 he held the record in Major League Baseball for the most strikeouts in any professional career – that is until 1964 when another player took the ‘crown’!  When it was suggested that he pull back a bit, he pointed out that “every strike brings me closer to the next Home Run,” and that’s interesting because Babe Ruth holds multiple records in the Baseball Hall of Fame because he gave it his ‘over the top’ all!

Some coaches say, "There's no such thing as 'failure' - there's only 'feedback'!"
Others spout this: "Feedback is the breakfast of Champions!"
But I say to you (and to myself!) "Have they lost all connection with their feelings?" Failure sucks! And, frankly, I’m no fan of unsolicited feedback – it’s like having a breakfast dished up that you didn’t order or desire!

But here, Babe Ruth doesn't need to get tangled up in the feelings because his eye is on the goal: the Home Run.  Which brings me to this strange phrase, “Fail Forward”…
When you fail far enough forward - when you look far enough forward - every setback simple transforms into another step closer to victory!

Failure is not a dead end but data. It's a necessary iteration in the process of building something new.
The entrepreneur's "fail forward" mindset includes these core beliefs:

🎓 Failure is a teacher, not an identity. You didn't "fail" as a person. You ran an experiment that didn't work. Now you know something you didn't know before.

🛑 The only real failure is stopping. If you fall down and stay down, that's failure. If you fall down, learn, adjust, and get back up—you've moved forward even though you fell. "Fall seven times; stand up eight!" (an empowering Japanese proverb (七転び八起き, nana korobi, ya oki) that symbolizes unyielding resilience and perseverance.

🏃‍♀️‍➡️ Speed of iteration matters. Fail fast, learn fast, pivot fast. The entrepreneur who fails ten times in a year is often ahead of the one who takes five years to avoid a single failure.

🚥 Perfectionism is paralysis. The caterpillar does not become a butterfly by staying in the cocoon until it's "ready." It dissolves. That's messy. "Fail forward" is the permission to be messy in motion.

🦋 Even the caterpillar's dissolution is not wasted. It's the only path to wings.

May Life help you find your wings this week, and may you fly as high as you’d love to.

Lex

A Moodscope member