Failure Modes: Too Early or Too Late

One of my dear friends has been fabulously successful as tech entrepreneur, and he says that one of the keys to his success is this dictum: Be roughly 5 years ahead of the market. If you are earlier than that, say 10 years ahead of the market, you will exhaust your money and energy educating customers and training partners before the market takes off. But, if you are much less than 5 years ahead, you will be playing catchup with someone else who got there first and built a lead. The sweet spot in my friend’s experience is about 5 years.

Photo by James Fuller on Unsplash

I fail at following my friend’s wisdom. I am always way… WAY… too early. That’s not a brag; that’s a confession. I have blown huge amounts of energy, time, and money on ideas that were too far ahead of their time. In terms of commercial success, I was wrong. Repeatedly. Why? My preferred Failure Mode reveals my biases, and the big ones include…

1. I want to solve puzzles. I am very good at it, and my brain is addicted to the chemical rewards of solving a puzzle first or solving it in a very novel way. So, there are intrinsic rewards — quite independent of financial/commercial success — that drive my behavior to a large degree. That’s fine, but it’s important for me to realize why I find an opportunity attractive, because otherwise I can easily convince myself that there’s a big commercial potential for a venture when what I’m actually excited about is solving an unsolved puzzle.

2. It’s very hard to unsee what you have seen. In fact, once you see a pattern, it’s hard to imagine that anyone else COULDN’T see it. The thing seems totally obvious! That’s one of the reasons that almost anyone can reverse-engineer innovations that only a genius could conceive in the first place. Our brains are excellent pattern-matching machines. But, often the novel pattern that is so obvious to the innovator is actually invisible to others. For an example of human pattern-fixation, do you see an old woman or a young woman in the sketch below?

This pattern-fixation is what happens when other folks are locked into completely different patterns from what I see. But, my optimism about other people often mixes with my can’t-unsee-that fixation, and I struggle to imagine that other people won’t be able to see the charm of my new solution.

3. I hate… literally HATE… undone items on my todo list. Often, while having a drink with Elise, I’ll think of something that needs to be done on a writing project, or on a boat project, or in the yard… and I cannot resist the impulse to get up and do it immediately so that I don’t have to remember it or spend background cycles thinking about how I still need to do it. My brain suffers when aware of broken things around me, so I am driven to fix those things ASAP. It’s a form of impatience. It’s a form of pain-intolerance. It’s a form of risk management. It’s a form of identity expression. It’s a flaw, and it accounts for a lot of the timing/pace at which I move — which is to say, generally, too fast.

4. I love to be the guide. It makes me feel good to be helpful to other people. And, one of the best ways to do that is to figure out things that they have not figured out yet. So, there I am attracted by non-commercial earliness again. That’s ok, as long I am honest with myself about what is pushing me to hurry.

There are many more reasons, but I hope you see a pattern: my habitual timing bias (that is, usually being too early) reveals my reward preferences. I share all of this personal stuff to put some flesh around the idea of what a bias looks like, where it comes from, and what its consequences can be. My hope is that my unflattering self-portrait can help you see better the consequences of your natural biases, so that you can perhaps be a bit more intentional in how you manage your recurring choice between the Failure Mode of being early vs. the Failure Mode of being late.

If, unlike me, you are consistently a little too late to the party, you should ask yourself WHY? What desire or value makes you slower than you should be to research a new idea, run a new experiment, replace an old tool, develop a new habit, make a new friend, speak up with a novel perspective, or even just get dressed on time? For some folks I know, the culprit is the reward of the Familiar. Sticking with the familiar gives you the best chance at predicting what you will face, allows you to mirror others rather than decide for yourself, and showcases that easy dexterity that comes from repetition — while avoiding the insecure sensation of clumsiness in sight-reading one’s way through new situations. If you are prone to anxiety when forced to improvise, you very likely prefer to follow rather than to pioneer, to join rather than to create. That’s just one example of many that might be the root cause of your habitual tardiness to emerging parties.

Whether you are consistently late to the party — or consistently the first (only?) one to the party — figure out what incentives your brain is chasing that make you prone to your usual Failure Mode. Then decide if you want to accept your bias or to change it. But, you should realize that the Goldilocks zone is very narrow, which means that practically you are choosing a bias toward one Failure Mode or the other: being too early or being too late.

What’s your Failure Mode, and are you fine with it?

Have a great week!

Scott

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