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skewness issue; it does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

nothing fails like success. Once-dominant empires have failed for this very reason. People get to a certain level of success and get too comfortable.

Punishing failure and "shooting the messenger" only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.

The second thing we can do is to learn how to fail properly. Failing properly has two major components. First, never take a risk that will do you in completely. (Never get taken out of the game completely.) Second, develop the personal resilience to learn from your failures and start again. With these two rules, you can only fail temporarily.

Poker has taught me to disconnect failure from outcomes. Just because I lose doesn't mean I failed, and just because I won doesn't mean I succeeded--not when you define success and failure around making good decisions that will win in the long run. What matters is the decisions I made along the way, and every decision failure is an opportunity to learn and adjust my strategy going forward. By doing this, losing becomes a less emotional experience and more an opportunity to explore and learn.

In his book The Pursuit of Perfect, Tal Ben-Shahar writes that "we can only learn to deal with failure by actually experiencing failure, by living through it. The earlier we face difficulties and drawbacks, the better prepared we are to deal with the inevitable obstacles along our path."

I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.

Resilience requires that we first define our failure modes and then perform testing to ensure that these failure modes operate as designed. One way we do this is by injecting faults into our production environment and rehearsing large-scale failures so we are confident we can recover from accidents when they occur, ideally without even impacting our customers.

"People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success."

I'm delighted to admit that I've failed at more challenges than anyone I know. There's a nonzero chance that reading this book will set you on the path of your own magnificent screwups and cavernous disappointments. You're welcome! And if I forgot to mention it earlier, that's exactly where you want to be: steeped to your eyebrows in failure. It's a good place to be because failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.

The people I respect most are those who fail well. I respect them even more than those who succeed. That is because failing is a painful experience while succeeding is a joyous one, so it requires much more character to fail, change, and then succeed than to just succeed. People who are just succeeding must not be pushing their limits. Of course the worst are those who fail and don't recognize it and don't change.

'It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.' J. K. Rowling

Almost always, your road to victory goes through a place called "failure."

The sweat of success is failure, and I am soaking wet.