Mindsets | Alessandro Perilli

Failure is massively overrated

peris — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 18:12:17 +0000

Q: How important is failure in business?

A: Well, I think failure is massively overrated.

Most businesses fail for more than one reason.

And so when a business fails, you often don’t learn anything at all because the failure was overdetermined.

You will think it failed for reason number one, but it failed for reasons numbers one through five.

And so the next business you start will fail for reason number two and then for three and so on.

And so I think people actually do not learn very much from failure, and I think it ends up being quite damaging and demoralizing to people in the long run.

My sense is that the death of every business is a tragedy.

It’s not some sort of beautiful aesthetic where there’s a lot of carnage, but that’s how progress happens, and it’s not some sort of educational imperative.

So I think failure is neither a Darwinian nor an educational imperative.

Failure is always simply a tragedy.

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Digitally-native teenagers’ expectations about social interactions in real life

peris — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:28:15 +0000

Inspiration is for amateurs

peris — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 10:33:50 +0000

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; ... Read more

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Find who and what needs you the most

peris — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 10:21:59 +0000

No one can compete with you on being you.

Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.

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PowerPoint presentations are a litany of incomplete thoughts

peris — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 10:14:03 +0000

PowerPoint presentations, with their litany of bullet points and incomplete thoughts, were banned inside the company despite being popular in the rest of corporate America. Instead, all meetings started with almost meditative readings of data-rich, six-page documents, called “narratives.” The act of business building at Amazon was an editorial process, with papers subject to numerous ... Read more

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How to think like a fallibilist

peris — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 22:38:00 +0000

Fallibilists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so they are predisposed to try to change them for the better.

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