Why your startup needs to hire screwups
The most important question ever asked of me came from the mouth of a wrinkled old man with an artificial heart in his fanny pack. It was: Do you want to be a fuckup with a past or a fuckup with a future?
Of course, most of us would say…neither. We don’t want to be fuckups at all.
But I had been a fuckup, and I was very much, in that moment, a fuckup. So I decided that I wanted to be a fuckup who also had a future.
That man was the founder and head therapist of a residential treatment program for adolescents and young adults who were forceful, intelligent, and bold but who had also torpedoed their lives at early ages. They had failed repeatedly. They had been arrested. They had been addicted. They had dropped out of high school or college. They often came from significant wealth and privilege, but they had still managed to make messes of their futures.
I was right at home. With them, I became determined to start again, to relaunch myself, to stay on an upward trajectory. (I still had a lot of learning to do; I was expelled just months later.)
Since then, I graduated with all As from the Johns Hopkins University. I co-founded a startup, which is currently in beta and supported by capital. I wrote a book. I was the president of the Cum Laude Society and tutoring organization at my (non-therapeutic) boarding school. I now work at Bionic, where I was an intern for almost three years before I joined.
These achievements themselves matter little to me. What matters to me is that failure doesn’t scare me. What matters to me is that, even if someone were to rip my diploma in half, or beat my startup to market, or sue me for what I say in my book, I would only become grittier, more determined, and more self-aware.
Those of you in the startup world probably know where I’m going with this.
Bionic — where I work as a growth analyst — builds startups inside of large enterprises and teaches their executives how to invest like VCs. One of the first things that we do at the beginning of a partnership is to address head-on the corporate mindset, which says that failure is bad, costly, and not worth it. We rewire that thinking to say that failure is good, incalculably valuable, and critical to growth. Only then can we begin the more tangible work of building companies and investing small and often.
Anyone who works in innovation knows that a willingness to fail is perhaps the most critical aspect of the work that we do. And that mindset must go all the way down to the core of every single employee, because if it doesn’t, our culture becomes so terrified of messing up that we stagnate. Or, even worse than doing nothing, we take the “safe” action, which is actually not at all safe, because it eats up capital and personnel without delivering anything useful to the customer. We keep funding projects that don’t work, and we keep refusing to face the uncomfortable truth of our failures.
Imagine what happens when we refuse to admit that our character has flaws. When we refuse to hear feedback from coworkers. When we avoid giving feedback to our bosses. When we pretend that we can never fail as leaders. When we walk on eggshells at work, when we wonder whether we’re being gossiped about, when we waste so much time crafting emails that play into office politics, and all because we’re so worried about being perceived as “a failure.”
We have already spent large portions of our lives making giant mistakes that were both visible and catastrophic. These mistakes were wholly unproductive. They required a great deal of backpedaling and fixing and redoing. And then, suddenly, we had to re-train ourselves to be unafraid of those mistakes if we had any hope of getting up and moving forward.
Those of us who spent years in therapy and/or residential treatment, as I did, were coached to admit our failures and to embrace them, to use them for introspection and for power, for insight and for motivation. To never make those same mistakes again. To learn. Like startups, the core of such programs is accepting when an action you took caused negative results to you and to those around you. Looking at this offensive, ugly, messy thing under a magnifying glass is absolutely a terrifying, unpleasant process the first time (or ten) that you do it, but it’s the most important thing you can ever do because it teaches you how to face the inevitable difficulties ahead.
When I applied to college, my strategy was: show the admissions department my real, messy self with my real, fuckup past, because if they were scared off by either, then it wouldn’t be a good fit, and I would be lucky to get rejected. It worked. When I applied to be in Bionic’s first intern cohort, I did the same. I could never know precisely why the hiring lead at the time picked me. But I do know that not one of my incredible coworkers has ever made me feel anything but respected and celebrated for being exactly who I am, all while encouraging me to be even better and never being afraid to call me out when I mess up. We don’t all have the same background, but we all have the same growth mindset.
The elements of startup culture that you so often hear about — the hover-boards, the cold brew and kombucha on tap, the ludicrous amounts of vacation time, the international off-sites — are real, but they’re mere reflections of what forms our foundations: a trust in our people, a delight in life, a commitment to change ourselves and the world, and a resilience that’s formed by daily (and hourly) failures. With my current resume, I could probably get hired at a large corporation or major consulting firm. But unless it champions productive failure, I wouldn’t want anything to do with it.
Why your startup needs to hire screwups
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