Originally published 2018-08-09.
Will Smith’s message about failure is short: stop avoiding it, because failing is how you find out what to work on next. In a clip shared by Goalcast in 2018, the actor compares it to lifting weights, where you push a muscle until it gives out, and sums it up as “Fail early, fail often, fail forward.” The image above shows a quote card with a related line often attributed to him, about keeping failure away from your heart and success away from your head.
Below is what Smith actually says, what research on creativity and training adds, and how to use the idea without turning it into reckless risk-taking.
What Will Smith says about failure
You can watch the full clip here. It runs only a few minutes and was widely shared as a motivational video.
Smith’s argument has three parts. First, he admits that avoiding failure is natural; people are wired to protect themselves from embarrassment and loss. Second, he says that the useful information in life tends to arrive through failure rather than success, because success rarely forces you to look closely at what you did. Third, he insists that people who achieve a lot usually fail far more often than everyone else, simply because they attempt more and keep going.
He frames practice in the same way. In his words, “practice is controlled failure”: you work right at the edge of what you can do until something adjusts and the hard thing becomes possible. Elsewhere in the clip he adds that failure “helps you to recognize the areas where you need to evolve.”
The gym comparison, and what training research says
Smith’s example is the weight room. When you lift, he says, you are deliberately looking for the point where the muscle cannot do another repetition, because that is where the body adapts. As a metaphor it works well: growth comes from strain, not comfort.
As literal training advice it needs a footnote. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis in the Journal of Sport and Health Science, by Jozo Grgic and colleagues, compared training to complete muscular failure with stopping a little short. It found that going all the way to failure does not seem to be required for gains in strength or muscle size, although it did not appear to harm them either. In other words, the body needs a real challenge, not necessarily total exhaustion every time. That is a useful way to read Smith’s message too: seek difficulty, but you do not have to collapse to learn.
If you are new to exercise or have a health condition, talk to a doctor before changing how hard you train.
Why productive people fail more often
Smith’s claim that successful people fail more than they succeed has support in the study of creativity. The psychologist Dean Keith Simonton found that the quality of creative work rises with its quantity: the more ideas or works someone produces, the more chances they have of producing a masterpiece, and the more misses they collect along the way.
The examples are familiar. Thomas Edison received 1,093 US patents, yet most of them went nowhere and about a third of the patent applications he led were rejected. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and Macbeth, but also plays that are rarely performed today. Mozart left more than 600 catalogued works, and only a fraction are concert staples. Even Beethoven reportedly spoke of some of his nine symphonies as lesser, smaller pieces.
The point is not that failure is good in itself. It is that output and risk go together. People who produce a great deal take more shots, and some of those shots miss.
How to fail forward in practice
“Failing forward” only works if each miss teaches you something specific. A quick review after a setback helps turn disappointment into information:
- Describe what happened in one or two sentences. Keep it factual, as if writing for someone who was not there.
- Separate what you controlled from what you did not. A missed deadline because of your planning is different from a project cancelled by a client.
- Name one skill to improve. Pricing, writing, timing, asking for help: pick one, not five.
- Design a small next attempt. Make it cheap and quick, so you can learn again without risking much.
This is the “controlled” part of controlled failure. A musician practising a hard passage slowly, a writer drafting a chapter that will be cut, or a business owner testing a new service with a few customers are all failing on purpose, in a way they can survive.
Fear of failure, and how to work with it
Many people never start the project they keep dreaming about because they fear looking foolish or losing money. That fear is reasonable; it protects us from real harm. The trick is to shrink the size of each possible failure until it becomes acceptable.
If you want to work for yourself, for example, you do not have to quit your job tomorrow. You might take one paying client on the side, run a weekend stall or build a small website first. Each step gives you evidence about whether the idea works and what you still need to learn. That approach honours Smith’s advice to live near the edge of your abilities without betting everything on a single attempt.
It also helps to change what counts as success. If the goal of a first attempt is to learn three things about your customers or your craft, a disappointing result can still be a successful experiment.
Where the advice can go too far
Motivational clips leave out some important context. Not everyone can afford to fail in the same way: savings, family support and health all change how much risk a person can take. Survivorship bias also plays a part. We hear from famous people whose failures led to success, not from the many whose repeated attempts did not pay off.
Smith’s message is strongest when read as advice about learning, not about gambling. Seek out challenges that stretch you, expect to fall short often, and treat each miss as a lesson to study. That is a habit almost anyone can build, whatever their goals.
Sources: Goalcast, “Will Smith: This Is Why You Need to Fail” and the original video on YouTube; Grgic et al., “Effects of resistance training performed to repetition failure or non-failure on muscular strength and hypertrophy,” Journal of Sport and Health Science (2022); Scientific American, “Why Creativity Is a Numbers Game”; earlier coverage credited to Ideapod.
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