How to Deal With Failure: The Second Draft

The restaurant lasted nine months. It was good — genuinely good, the food was not the problem — and it closed anyway, in the way that most small restaurants close, through a slow accumulation of decisions that each seemed reasonable at the time. Wrong street. Too many covers required to break even. A menu with eleven items that needed four sections of a kitchen the chef could not afford to staff.

On the last night, after the chairs were up, the chef sat down with a notebook and did something that almost nobody does. He wrote out, in plain language, the sequence of decisions that had killed it. Not the feelings. The decisions. Sixteen of them. Beside each one he wrote what he had believed at the time that made the decision look sensible, because that, he had decided, was the actual asset. Anyone can list mistakes. The valuable thing is the list of beliefs that made the mistakes invisible.

The sixteenth entry read: I believed that if the food was good enough, the location would not matter. He underlined it twice, not because it was the biggest error, but because he could see, sitting there at midnight, that it was the belief he still half held. That is the mark of a live one. The beliefs you have already abandoned cost you nothing to write down.

Four years later he opened a second place. It has six items on the menu, sits on a street with foot traffic he counted himself over three separate weekends, and requires forty-one covers a night to break even, a number he can recite because he calculated it before signing anything. It is not a better restaurant because he is a better cook. He was always a good cook. It is a better restaurant because it was built by someone who had a written record of how his own mind had misled him.

There is a common and useless way of dealing with failure, which is to extract a moral. The moral is always something like persevere, or believe in yourself, or perhaps everything happens for a reason, and none of these change a single decision you will make next time, because they are not decisions. They are weather. The useful way is narrower and much less consoling: convert the failure into a specific, written, falsifiable list of the assumptions that produced it, and then treat that list as the most expensive document you own. You paid for it in years.

The chef says the notebook was the only thing he took out of the first place that was worth anything. Everything else — the ovens, the tables, the wine — was sold at a loss to people who wanted a bargain. The list of sixteen beliefs sold for nothing, because it was worthless to everybody on earth except him, which is precisely why it was the only part of the wreck worth carrying.

Failure is only tuition if you write down what you were taught. Otherwise it is simply money that went away, and the same beliefs remain in you, patient and unexamined, waiting for the next nine months.