What parts had promise? Carry them forward. What parts failed? Rework them. Stop writing first drafts. Start iterating. That’s the difference between winning and losing.

Success isn’t about just trying again, it’s about HOW you try again. After a setback, don’t just move on. Break down your last attempt.

It's much faster to write a second draft than a first. Losers, meanwhile, "flail." . They jump from one new idea to the next and keep starting over. They are always trying something brand new, abandoning any quality they previously acquired.

Why were winners getting faster and better over time?. The reason is that they don't start from scratch after a failure. They analyze what worked, keep those components, and focus on improving what sucked. Each attempt builds on the last, letting them compound quality.

Why do winners accelerate?. The answer is: because they are improving. When researchers compared the second-from-last attempt of winners to their first ever attempt, they found a huge increase in quality. Again, losers did not show the same improvement. Here's why.

Losers did not exhibit this same pattern. Their time-between-attempts stayed long. Increasing pace is one of the most reliable early predictors of who is on the path to victory. This begs the question. .

Winners get FASTER. The time between each of their attempts gets shorter and shorter. For example - the time between a winning founder's 2nd failed startup and their 3rd is shorter than the gap between their 1st and their 2nd.

Researchers studied thousands of high-stakes attempts at success:. • 776,721 grant applications from scientists. • 58,111 startups trying to get acquired or IPO. • The attack histories of terrorist groups. Across all 3, they found one clear signal that separates the winners.

This study revealed what successful founders, scientists & terrorists, have in common. It’s not luck, raw talent, or just persistence. Winners and losers fail about the same number of times and their first attempts are equally bad. The secret is something else entirely ⬇️

Interesting to read that @scottbelsky challenges himself to notice what ISN'T being discussed at conferences. Chimes with something @dharmesh said recently—that the opportunity in AI is whatever it CAN'T do today. People who build the future don't just conjure it out of thin air,

Most experts in a given field tend to know all there is to know about what has already happened, and yet are entirely wrong about what will happen next.

4 hours. That's how long it took J.K. Rowling to dream up Harry Potter on a broken down train. But the time between that day & publishing the first book?. 7 years. As @scottbelsky once said, "It's not about ideas. It's about making ideas happen."

In 2010, Walter Isaacson gained access to Jony Ive’s top secret design studio at Apple. Once inside, Isaacson learned first hand about the creative rituals that Jony and Steve Jobs engaged in each day:

Tinder’s iconic swipe right/left gesture was an almost accidental invention. A huge number of world changing ideas have similarly serendipitous origin stories. You need a degree of novelty in your life to achieve peak creativity - a bias toward random.

Source: The association between participation in mental health protective behaviours and mental well-being: cross sectional survey among Western Australian adults.

As per the study:. "The frequency of attending local events, formal/informal groups, large public events, and whether or not you were doing something challenging or volunteering were not significant predictors of mental well-being.".