The Value of an Early Failure
October 11, 2026
When you are building something genuinely new, one of the best things that can happen is for something to go wrong early.
Not because failure is good in itself.
But because early failure exposes assumptions while you still have time to change them.
A process that looked right on paper breaks in practice. A customer behaves differently from what you expected. A dependency you barely noticed matters suddenly. Something the team thought was clear turns out not to be.
None of this feels good while it is happening.
But every problem discovered early is one less problem waiting for you later, when it costs much more to fix.
The real waste is not an early failure.
It is going too far before learning what the failure was trying to teach you.
