Are you afraid of mistakes, or of missing an opportunity?... Type 1 people and Type 2 people
Type 1 people fear mistakes. For them, failure is a shameful and miserable experience. As a result they are risk-averse, and even when they do progress, it's only incremental. Type 2 people, by contrast, fear missing an opportunity. Places like Silicon Valley are full of Type 2 entrepreneurs. (369p)
From Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, translated by Kwon O-yeol, Abundance — A Future Forecast of a New Civilization of Innovation and Prosperity (Wisebury)
'Failure' is a word we all want to avoid. But failure often becomes the trigger for innovation. Professor Baba Shiv's division of how humans think about risk into two categories is interesting: Type 1 and Type 2. The former fears mistakes, the latter fears missing opportunities. Type 1 people think of failure as a shameful, miserable experience; Type 2 people think it's shameful to sit around while an opportunity passes. A big difference. Shiv said this of Type 2 people: "For these people, what's shameful is sitting outside the sidelines while someone else grabs a big idea and runs with it. Failure is not bad. In fact, it can be pretty thrilling. Precious nuggets of gold come out of those failures — the insights and 'aha!' moments that lead us to the next innovation." Thoughts on mistakes and failure... Are you a Type 1 or a Type 2? It's a problem to be so terrified and ashamed of failure that you only try to avoid risk. Of course, fear of missing an opportunity isn't an excuse for reckless, unrecoverable challenges either. The wisdom to know the difference is hard to come by, which is probably why life isn't easy.
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