Failing is a feature, not a bug.
Chris Anselmo
The meaning of the quote
In 2010, as Netflix moved its streaming service onto Amazon’s cloud servers, its engineers built a program called Chaos Monkey. Its whole job was to switch off random servers in the middle of the workday, while customers were watching shows.
The team knew servers would crash sooner or later and wanted those crashes to happen while engineers sat at their desks, not at 3 a.m. on a holiday weekend. Every forced failure pointed to a weak spot, and the service got sturdier with each one.
Chris Anselmo borrows his words from that world. In software, a bug is a mistake nobody planned for, whereas a feature is something the builders put there on purpose. The quote moves failing from the first group into the second.
Most people treat their failures like bugs, hiding them and hoping nobody noticed. Anselmo asks you to see failure as part of how you were built to learn.
Watch a toddler learn to walk. She falls dozens of times a day, and no parent thinks she’s broken. Each fall teaches her legs a little more about balance.
Action steps
Netflix got stronger by planning its failures and studying each one. You can run a smaller version of the same test in your own life.
- Pick something you’ll probably fail at this week.
A cold email to someone busy or a recipe you’ve never cooked. Go in expecting to fall short and decide ahead of time what you want to find out. - Write down what broke.
Give yourself 5 minutes after the failure to note what went wrong and one change you’ll make next time. Stick to what happened and skip the verdict on yourself. - Run the test again.
Try the same thing with that one change. A failure turns into a feature the moment it shapes your next attempt.
Treat your next failure the way Netflix treats a crashed server, as a test that just showed you where to look.
About the author
Chris Anselmo was 18 and a senior in high school when a car accident put him in hospital. Just before he was sent home, routine blood work showed something odd, and further tests found a rare disease called limb-girdle muscular dystrophy type 2B. Doctors told him he’d be fine as long as he avoided hard exercise.
At 21, just out of college, he felt a burning in his calves during an evening run. The disease had arrived.
Within 3 years his knees were giving out on sidewalks without warning, and a neurologist told him he would likely need a wheelchair within 10 years. While friends got promotions, bought houses and married, he worried about getting up off the pavement on his own.
The falls kept coming, and so did the getting up. In the podcast MindForce, Anselmo said learning to fall and stand back up showed him how tough he was inside.
That toughness carried him back to school for an MBA and onto conference stages as a speaker. In January 2023 he launched a Substack newsletter, half afraid his only subscribers would be his parents. Within a few weeks 100 people had signed up, and today thousands read it.
Naming it took so long that he joked it nearly ended up as Chris Anselmo’s Adversity Website. One sleepless night the name Goodbye, Adversity came to him. Then he admitted adversity never leaves for good and flipped it to Hello, Adversity.
That name follows the same idea as the quote. In his newsletter he writes about living with failure rather than trying to delete it, including a 2-part series from spring 2023 called Failed, Not a Failure and The Failure File.
Resources
- Hello, Adversity (Website)
- The Inner Journey: Navigating Life with a Rare Disease (Podcast)
- Navigating Adversity Through Writing (Article)
- An expert is a person (Article)
- All life is an experiment (Article)
- Chaos engineering (Wikipedia)
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