Trying is the first step toward failure.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
The meaning of the quote
Homer Simpson has a simple plan for never failing. He never tries.
This quote is a joke, and the logic holds up perfectly until you look at it. If you skip the attempt, you can’t lose. You can’t win either, but the quote lets the second half hide behind the first. Homer says the line in The Simpsons to justify never making an effort, which is why it gets a laugh.
Millions of people run Homer’s plan without the cartoon voice. They don’t apply for the job, ask the question in class, post the video or start the business. Each skipped attempt feels like a small win because nothing went wrong. Nothing went right either, and that silence is easy to mistake for safety.
Fear of failing mostly works by guessing. Your brain pictures the worst version of the attempt, a room full of people laughing, and treats the picture as if it had already happened. Homer’s joke exposes the guess by pushing it to the extreme.
Take James Dyson, who built more than 5,000 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before he had one he could sell. Every early prototype failed, and every failure told him something the next one could use. Trying was the only way he could get that information.
The best learners treat a failed attempt as the price of knowledge. Peter C. Brown’s view of failure explains why struggling often beats getting it right the first time.
Action steps
Fear shrinks when the attempt does. These 3 steps make trying cheap enough that you stop negotiating with yourself.
- Shrink the attempt.
Don’t write the book, write 1 page. Don’t launch the business, ask 1 stranger if they would pay for it. A small attempt can fail in public without costing you much. - Set a failure quota.
Decide you’ll send 10 applications or pitch 5 ideas this month, and count the rejections as the goal. Once failing is part of the plan, a no stops feeling like a verdict. - Catch your Homer move.
Notice the moment you reach for an excuse like “I’ll start Monday” or “I’m not ready yet”. Write it down and do 5 minutes of the task right then.
Homer gets away with never trying because he lives in a cartoon where nothing changes between episodes. You don’t.
About the author
Homer is a cartoon, so the story starts with the man who drew him. In 1977, Matt Groening was 23, living in Los Angeles and short on prospects. He bussed tables, washed dishes at a nursing home and landscaped at a sewage treatment plant.
He turned those years into a self-published comic called Life in Hell and made his first professional sale to Wet magazine in 1978.
In 1985, producer James L. Brooks asked Groening to adapt the comic for The Tracey Ullman Show. Groening worried he would lose control of his characters, so he made up a new family on the spot. The Simpsons shorts first aired on April 19, 1987.
He named the family after his own. Homer is his father’s name, Marge is his mother Margaret, and Lisa and Maggie are his sisters. Bart is an anagram of “brat”, chosen so Groening wouldn’t have to use his own name.
The half-hour series premiered on December 17, 1989 with “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire.” Groening later co-created Futurama in 1999 and Disenchantment for Netflix in 2018.
Homer works as a safety inspector at the Springfield nuclear power plant, which says a lot about how the show feels about careers built on not trying. The quote is Homer in a nutshell, a man with a perfect excuse for every effort he skips.
Resources
- The Simpsons (Wikipedia)
- Matt Groening (Wikipedia)
- James Dyson (Wikipedia)
- The Simpsons Taught Me the Greatest Lesson I’ve Ever Learned (Article)
- It’s not the failure that’s desirable (Article)
- A learning experience is one of those things (Article)
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