“You learn something when you have a model about the world, and then in some way, you get some data that tells you you're wrong. You learn nothing when you're right. At best, you deepen grooves in your brain. If you're wrong, whatever else we want to call it, that feels bad… If you hate failure, you will emotionally avoid that moment, which means you're emotionally avoiding learning.”
Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques · October 2026
Teller estimates that once a hard project succeeds, a team could rebuild it in about a tenth of the time, so most of the work was learning what to make. That is his case for destigmatizing failure at X.
Transcript
…most of them aren't, wanting to win, wanting to get it to be right each time leads to sadness after sadness and denial kicks in that slows up the efficiency of being the learning machine that we would aspire to be, verifying which of the many that we've started is in fact worth doubling down on.
…bring about in your organization that looks at it this way? Because many people don't think of projects this way. They start a project, they want it to be successful, not let's start a project and figure out all the reasons why it won't be successful. Can you talk a little bit about that mindset?
…it's the learning what to make. And the more you're shooting over the horizon, which is what a moonshot is, the more of the journey is exploration, not the settling that happens afterwards. So, if you agree conceptually, intellectually, that we're on a learning journey, then scary as it is to be wrong, we need to focus on the moments where we learn something. And when do you learn something? You learn something when you have a model about the world, and then in some way, you get some data that tells you you're wrong. You learn nothing when you're right. At best, you deepen grooves in your brain. If you're wrong, whatever else we want to call it, that feels bad. That's a failure of a kind. If you hate failure, you will emotionally avoid that moment, which means you're emotionally avoiding learning. We just agreed we're going to spend 90 plus percent of our time learning, then we need to destigmatize failure so we can have our learning loops be as tight as possible.
So, a moonshot mindset is really about seeing learning as the goal. How do you inculcate and support that? And how do you produce anything if for many companies, productivity is what's the goal? So, how do you produce the amazing things that you've done and help people see learning as the goal, not…
It's very hard to prevent people from chasing progress. Even at X, there's a decent amount of it, even though I'm constantly going around trying to stamp it out and redirect people towards learning. So, it's not hard for the end result of a lot of learning to turn into something very valuable that…
I find it really interesting that humility and curiosity are what keep the flames going for learning. How do you capture the learning across the different teams? We had Amy Edmondson on, and she talks a lot about the right kind of failure and learning from the failure and the processes you can put…
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