YakShaving

Last year, I went to FailCon and StartupSchool (they were situated around the same weekend). I could easily say that I learned way more listening to the cases of failures than the “here’s what worked for me, but probably won’t work again, and most certainly won’t work for you if you do it exactly the same way”.

Failure is interesting because it keeps people on their toes. Behavioral economics tells us that people try to minimize loss more than focus on maximizing gain. In other words, we are more afraid to fail than anticipate success.

Learning from failure seems in vogue. People like to muse about it. On the surface, it’s funny. Luckily in the West, we can laugh about failure (esp. silicon valley). There’s a whole site dedicated to fail on the lolcat network.

And so, going along with my theme of learning from decisions, I thought I’d do a quick mindmap review of Billion Dollar Lessons. I don’t read business books very often anymore (tl;dr), but I’m interested in learning about strategy through understanding failure, so I took at look at this book.

I made this so I could refer back to from time to time, feel free to check it out and dload the full version. Click here or on the image to get it.