We all love a good success story—the polished final product, the clean launch, the perfect solution.
But what about the twelve failed versions that came before it?
Somewhere along the way, we started treating failure like something to hide. Yet in reality, most progress comes from the things that didn’t work—at least not right away. Whether you’re building software, designing hardware, conducting research, or solving everyday problems, every failed attempt is an opportunity to contribute insight to the world.
When we share what didn’t work—and our version of why—it does more than fill the void of silence. It helps prevent repeated mistakes, sparks fresh ideas, exposes blind spots in our approach, invites collaboration, and opens the door for others to apply our thinking in entirely new ways.
A while back, I stumbled on a YouTuber named Major Hardware, who runs a fascinating series called The Fan Showdown. In it, subscribers design and submit custom PC fans that match the dimensions of a Noctua A12x25. Some submissions are practical; others are completely bizarre. But regardless of the design, Major Hardware tests every single one—as long as it fits the fan mount.
What makes this series powerful isn’t just the cool designs or unexpected winners. It’s the transparency.
He shares all the results—even the complete failures. Every fan gets benchmarked—airflow, static pressure, noise levels—regardless of how well (or poorly) it performs. And because of that openness, the entire community benefits. People learn from past mistakes, riff on unusual concepts, and continuously build on each other’s work. The feedback loop isn’t hidden—it’s public.
By the end of most seasons, something remarkable happens: the community’s fan designs often outperform the original Noctua for specific use cases. Whether it’s better airflow, lower noise, or improved pressure, the crowd doesn’t just catch up—they innovate past the starting point. And it all starts with sharing everything, not just the highlight reel.
This isn’t a new idea. We’ve seen it throughout history.
Thomas Edison tested thousands of materials before finding the right filament for the lightbulb. His notebooks were open records of failed ideas and incremental progress. The Dyson vacuum? 5,127 prototypes before the final version. NASA? They publicly share mission data—including the failures—so the entire space community can learn and improve.
These examples show us something simple but critical: we need to share more about the process, not just the results. We need to embrace the failures, the difficulties, the research, the insights, and all the messy, imperfect steps that come with trying to do something new.
This mindset is embedded in design thinking. It’s a nonlinear, iterative process made up of five steps:
Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
- In Empathize, we seek to understand the user—their needs and challenges—through research and observation.
- In Define, we clearly articulate the problem and what a meaningful solution should look like.
- In Ideate, we generate as many ideas as possible. (Personally, this is my favorite part—no wrong answers, just raw possibility.)
- In Prototype, we create low-fidelity models or quick experiments to test and explore ideas.
- And in Test, we gather feedback, run simulations, conduct user tests, and refine.
Importantly, this process is not linear. Teams often cycle back—learning something in the testing phase that redefines the problem, or sparks a new round of ideation. It’s not a clean ladder upward. It’s a spiral of insight—built on the back of failed assumptions and evolving understanding.
So why are we hiding our failures?
Maybe because they don’t sell well. Maybe because people don’t like reading about missteps. Maybe because it’s scary for a company or research group to say, “Look at all the time we spent on something that didn’t work.”
But what if we pulled ourselves away from the optics of it?
What if failure wasn’t shameful, but expected? What if sharing our dead ends wasn’t a liability, but a gift to the next creator?
We’d have a world where progress accelerates. Where teams don’t build from scratch, but from a shared starting point of experience. Where innovation compounds—not through secrets, but through stories.
So I urge every developer, researcher, hobbyist, and creator: share what didn’t work. Share your process. Share the learning—not just the launch.
Failure isn’t just part of innovation. It’s what makes innovation possible.