Why We Fail

Silver Medal Winner, Success and Motivation, 2012 Axiom Business Book Awards An essential guide for mastering failure in order to achieve your goals Success is often just a moment—a goal fulfilled, soon to be replaced with new goals. But failure is the ambitious person's constant companion, often dogging us for months, years or even decades before we finally reach our aim. In the groundbreaking book Why People Fail, Siimon Reynolds, one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, explores the main causes of failure, in any field, and reveals solutions for overcoming them and creating a successful personal and professional life. Why People Fail offers strategies and ideas for defeating the sixteen most common failure habits such as destructive thinking, low productivity, stress, fixed mindset, lack of daily rituals, and more. Outlines the common habits that lead to failure and shows how to overcome them Features dozens of tips and exercises to help increase business and personal success Written by Siimon Reynolds, an internationally recognized expert on high performance and business excellence Many people have changed their lives by mastering just one of the timeless principles in this book. Master five or ten and your life will rocket to a totally new level.

Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

There is no one else in the world like you. Your personal brand has been registered in your name and patented with your persona even though there may be hundreds of people carrying the same name. Creating, building, and developing your personal brand is entirely in your own hands. Conversely, destroying or diminishing your brand is also only in your own hands. Your brand is the essence of your own unique story. The key to this is reaching deep inside yourself and pulling out the authentic, the unique 'you', from within your own self. What we do with our own brand name could be the difference between being very successful and not so successful. This is as true for personal branding as it is for business branding. The Brand Called You outlines how critical it is for each one of us to understand the power and vulnerabilities of our brand and invest wisely and consistently in our persona and our name. Remember, the only legacy you will leave behind in the world is your name.

'There is an honesty and a clarity in Joe Moran's book If You Should Fail that normalises and softens the usual blows of life that enables us to accept and live with them rather than be diminished/wounded by them' Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass 'Full of wise insight and honesty. Moran manages to be funny, erudite and kindly: a rare - and compelling - combination. This is the essential antidote to a culture obsessed with success. Read it' Madeleine Bunting Failure is the small print in life's terms and conditions. Covering everything from examination dreams to fourth-placed Olympians, If You Should Fail is about how modern life, in a world of self-advertised success, makes us feel like failures, frauds and imposters. Widely acclaimed observer of daily life Joe Moran is here not to tell you that everything will be all right in the end, but to reassure you that failure is an occupational hazard of being human. As Moran shows, even the supremely gifted Leonardo da Vinci could be seen as a failure. Most artists, writers, sports stars and business people face failure. We all will, and can learn how to live with it. To echo Virginia Woolf, beauty "is only got by the failure to get it . . . by facing what must be humiliation - the things one can't do." Combining philosophy, psychology, history and literature, Moran's ultimately upbeat reflections on being human, and his critique of how we live now, offers comfort, hope - and solace. For we need to see that not every failure can be made into a success - and that's OK.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

The World’s Most Influential Book on Personal Success The bestselling classic that made Systems Over Goals, Talent Stacking, and Passion Is Overrated universal success advice has been reborn. Once in a generation, a book revolutionizes its category and becomes the preeminent reference that all subsequent books on the topic must pay homage to, in name or in spirit. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, is such a book for the field of personal success. A contrarian pundit and persuasion expert in a class of his own, Adams has reached hundreds of millions directly and indirectly through the 2013 first edition’s straightforward yet counterintuitive advice—to invite failure in, embrace it, then pick its pocket. The second edition of How to Fail is a tighter, updated version, by popular demand. Yet new and returning readers alike will find the same candor, humor, and timeless wisdom on productivity, career growth, health and fitness, and entrepreneurial success as the original classic. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Second Edition is the essential read (or re-read) for anyone who wants to find a unique path to personal victory—and make luck find you in whatever you do.

"Bold, bossy and bracing, Fail Fast, Fail Often is like a 200-page shot of B12, meant to energize the listless job seeker." —New York Times What if your biggest mistake is that you never make mistakes? Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz, psychologists, career counselors, and creators of the popular Stanford University course “Fail Fast, Fail Often,” have come to a compelling conclusion: happy and successful people tend to spend less time planning and more time acting. They get out into the world, try new things, and make mistakes, and in doing so, they benefit from unexpected experiences and opportunities. Drawing on the authors’ research in human development and innovation, Fail Fast, Fail Often shows readers how to allow their enthusiasm to guide them, to act boldly, and to leverage their strengths—even if they are terrified of failure.

Inspired by her hugely popular podcast, How To Fail is Elizabeth Day’s brilliantly funny, painfully honest and insightful celebration of things going wrong.