Why You Should Pretend You Already Failed

Have you ever worked on something and thought to yourself, “What if this goes horribly wrong?” I sure have. All the time.

When I’m writing articles, there’s always that thought that ruins the fun by asking that question like that annoying friend you have that you’d much rather not talk to. What’s annoying is that that thought has a point. What if things do go wrong? What then?

That question would petrify me. It’s like looking at Medusa herself. But now I’ve come to embrace it. There’s a lot of insight that you and I can get from asking what if something fails and how it did. This practice, which I picked up from Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath, is called doing a pre-mortem1.

Post-mortems are done after someone dies to figure out how they died. Pre-mortems flip that around. It’s about asking how someone could die, or in this case fail, and actively trying to prevent it. Here’s an example from my life recently.

While writing an article for work, I was wrought with the thoughts of, “What if this sucks?”

Instead of succumbing to the paralyzing effects of that question, I took a few minutes to list down a few ways my article could be classified as horrible. I asked myself, “If this turns out to be the worst article of all time, why would it be called that?”

Some of the reasons I thought of were that it might not be well researched enough and it would be a boring read. So I tackled those thoughts head on.

Thankfully, it worked. I sent that article to the editors and they had no problems with it (except for a few grammatical mistakes, but that’s not the point here).

So try it out. The next time you’re working on something, pretend it already sucks. How could you improve it?

Pre-mortems are one of the closest things you can get to time traveling and saving your future self from embarrassment and failure. It’s also a way to realize that right here, right now, you’ve got the power to direct how your life is going to go.