Make Failure Cheap (Courage to Be Rubbish)
Shorten the learning cycle by making each failure fast, cheap, and rebuildable.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 86%
McKeown reframes progress around the cost of failure rather than the quality of any single attempt. The mechanism, drawn from Paul MacCready's human-powered flight breakthrough, is to build versions so cheap and fast that a crash costs minutes to rebuild instead of months, compressing the learning cycle dramatically. Emotionally, you make failure cheaper by protecting the ugly first draft from your inner critic, the way Pixar protects its 'ugly babies,' and by attaching gratitude to setbacks so they sting less. Strategically, you engineer your undertakings as asymmetric bets with low downside and high upside, so taking action is always rational. The result is the courage to be rubbish: you ship the bad version, learn, and keep moving while perfectionists stay stuck at the starting line.
Origin
McKeown built the concept around Paul MacCready, who won the Kramer Prize for human-powered flight in 1977 after seventeen years of failure by better-funded teams, by realizing the true problem was making failure cheap rather than building beautiful machines.
Core principles
- 01Everything starts rubbish; every masterpiece began as an ugly draft.
- 02The real breakthrough is cheap failure, not perfect execution.
- 03Protect the ugly first version from the critic in your head.
- 04Make life an asymmetric bet: low downside, high upside.
- 05You either succeed or you get a story; both are wins.
How to run it
- 1
Reframe failure as a feature
Decide failure is built into the source code of the undertaking, not a sign something is wrong.
Pro tip Adopt the frame: you either succeed or you get a story worth telling.
- 2
Build the cheapest crashable version
Make prototypes ugly, light, and fast to rebuild rather than beautiful and slow.
Watch out Beautiful early versions raise the cost of each failure and slow learning to a crawl.
- 3
Compress the learning cycle
Minimize the time between a failed attempt and the next attempt so you learn far faster than rivals.
Pro tip Aim to have more failures in a day than competitors have in the machine's lifetime.
- 4
Protect the ugly first draft
Guard the rough early version from the critic in your head so it survives long enough to improve.
Pro tip Talk to yourself about mistakes the way a good coach would, not a harsh judge.
- 5
Add gratitude to setbacks
Be thankful along the way to lower the emotional cost of each failure and keep taking action.
- 6
Structure it as an asymmetric bet
Design the effort so the downside is small and the upside is large before you commit.
Pro tip Ask 'what's the worst that can happen?' to shrink the perceived risk.
In the wild
For seventeen years well-funded teams failed at human-powered flight, building beautiful machines that took six months to rebuild after each crash. MacCready, in debt with only friends and family, built an ugly, light craft he could repair in five minutes with broom handles. His team had more crashes in a day than rivals had in a machine's lifetime, and on the 223rd attempt they won the Kramer Prize, later crossing the English Channel.
→ Cheap, fast failure beat seventeen years of well-funded perfectionism.
John Acuff, early in his career, rented conference space he wasn't speaking at and printed a thousand flyers expecting crowds. Two people showed up, one a friend he already knew. He photographed the empty scene and turned it into one of his most popular blog posts, illustrating that a failed action still yields a story worth having.
→ A humiliating flop became durable, shareable content instead of a reason to stop.
Common mistakes
Trying to be perfect out of the gate
Solving the wrong puzzle, building a beautiful first version, makes failure expensive and stops you before you can learn.
Letting the inner critic kill the draft
Harsh self-talk about early mistakes destroys the rough version before it has a chance to become good.
Is it for you?
Best for
Creators, founders, and learners paralyzed by perfectionism or fear of looking stupid.
Not ideal for
High-stakes, irreversible situations where a single failure carries catastrophic, unrecoverable cost.
From the transcript
“the primary breakthrough was that you've got to make failure as cheap as possible”
“you either succeed or you have a story”
From the episode
How To Make Life Effortless - Greg McKeown - #314
Greg McKeown