Why We’re So Afraid to Fail | with Samuel West
Samuel West is an organizational psychologist and the founder of the Museum of Failure, a collection of the most spectacular product flops in modern history, from the Apple Newton to New Coke. Samuel walked Alex Buxeda through the museum piece by piece, started with the failures themselves and then went deeper: the scientific method as a way of living, why bold experiments beat careful ones, the psychology of play and flow, our evolutionary mismatch with fear, and why failure is almost never as catastrophic as we imagine it will be.
This conversation begins with a guided tour of the museum's failures, then opens into a discussion on experimentation, play, and the fear that holds us all back.
0:00 – Walking into the Museum of Failure
0:05 – Dyson Zone: headphones that make you a supervillain
0:22 – Adidas Springblade: the shoes that cut runners' legs
0:47 – Microsoft Zune: copying the iPod, too late
1:04 – Colgate Kitchen Entrees: toothpaste… and frozen dinners
1:26 – Olestra & the fat-free holy grail (with one problem)
1:49 – Apple Newton: the handwriting that never worked
2:18 – Kodak: inventing the digital camera and dying anyway
2:38 – The Sound Burger: a turntable that defeats its own purpose
3:11 – The UroClub: the golf club you pee into
3:45 – Nintendo Power Glove: the future you couldn't install
4:18 – Bic for Her: the pointlessly gendered pen
4:52 – New Coke: the flop taught in every MBA class
5:20 – The scientific method meets business
6:11 – Experiment small, fail cheap
7:03 – Switzerland, subsidiarity & why success kills bold experiments
8:09 – Is weeding out failure a sign of intelligence?
9:23 – Reputation, career stage & who can afford to own failure
9:39 – The brain's energy budget: playing vs. paranoia
10:05 – Why play has failure built into it
10:49 – Marriage, business & exposing yourself to serendipity
11:22 – Flow, Csikszentmihályi & the edge of your ability
12:04 – The twist: flow was "play" all along
12:28 – Evolutionary mismatch & the case for optimism
13:00 – Fear of failure vs. the fear of death
13:33 – Overreacting to airplanes, underreacting to cars
13:46 – Why failure is never as terrible as you imagine
14:35 – Owning up & the surprisingly forgiving world
14:57 – Closing thoughts