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Table of Contents

• Have We Been Romanticizing Failure?

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

Have We Been Romanticizing Failure?

Walk into almost any entrepreneurship conference, accelerator, or startup event and you'll hear the same advice:

Failure is necessary for success.

It's become part of the entrepreneurial gospel. Wear your failures like badges of honor. Fail fast. Fail often. Learn from failure. Investors ask founders about their biggest failures as though suffering itself somehow qualifies someone to build a great company.

But what if we've been romanticizing failure as an accomplishment rather than recognizing it as simply part of the human journey?

Because it's happening a heck of a lot more than any of us think it is.

A fascinating new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology introduces what the authors call the Failure Gap. Across more than thirty different areas of life, they found that people consistently underestimate how often things go wrong. Not just in entrepreneurship, but in healthcare, education, relationships, innovation, sports, and public policy. The reason isn't that failure is rare. It's that failure is systematically underreported because the people closest to it simply don't want to talk about it.

But somewhere along the way, we've convinced ourselves that life is supposed to move in a straight line. School. Career. Promotion. Marriage. Business. Retirement. Up and to the right. If something doesn't go according to plan, anxiety and judgment set in. We're not good enough. Then the negative spiral begins.

But the reality is that we're all on a journey—a road with twists and turns.

The more I thought about this paper, the more I realized we've created a strange contradiction. We're told that failure is part of success, yet we're surrounded by a culture that demands perfection.

Our social media feeds are carefully curated highlight reels. LinkedIn has become a never-ending stream of promotions, funding announcements, awards, and humble brags. Fitness apps celebrate streaks. Startup media celebrates unicorns. Every successful founder has a polished story explaining how failure shaped their journey.

It's like looking at an Ace of Spades. Looking at it face-on, it appears substantial. Rotate it ninety degrees and you realize it's just a thin piece of cardboard. We freeze a single moment in someone else's life, turn it into an ideal, and then beat ourselves up because we haven't reached that same place.

So what's the point of all of this?

It's not to celebrate failure. Quite the opposite.

Failure, by itself, deserves no applause. If I start ten companies and all ten fail because I refuse to learn anything, I'm not a wiser entrepreneur. I'm simply someone who has repeated the same mistake ten times. The value isn't in the failure. The value is in what failure reveals.

Every meaningful accomplishment in human history has been built on a mountain of discarded assumptions. Scientists don't discover by being right; they discover by proving themselves wrong. Engineers don't build safer airplanes by pretending every design works. Great relationships aren't built because two people never disappoint one another. They endure because two imperfect people learn how to navigate disappointment together.

Entrepreneurship is no different. The startup that runs out of money teaches something. The investor who loses on a deal learns something. The salesperson who gets rejected a hundred times eventually discovers what the hundred-and-first prospect needed to hear. None of those experiences are enjoyable. None of us would choose them if there were a shortcut. But they are part of the tuition we pay for competence.

And perhaps that's the real lesson from this research.

We've spent so much time trying to remove failure from our lives that we've forgotten it has always been part of the human experience. We fear it as though it's an unexpected visitor, when in reality it's been quietly traveling beside us all along. Every person you admire has failed in ways you'll never know because, as this paper argues, most failures never become part of the public story. They happen in private, they teach their lesson, and people move on.

Maybe we should stop asking whether failure is necessary for success.

I don't think that's the right question.

The better question is whether we're willing to learn from reality, even when reality tells us something we'd rather not hear.

Because that's what failure really is.

Failure is simply reality voting on one of our assumptions.

Sometimes reality says, "Try again." Sometimes it says, "Go in a different direction." Sometimes it says, "You were solving the wrong problem."

None of those responses make you a failure. They simply make you human.

And perhaps that's the biggest irony of all.

We've romanticized failure as though it's some extraordinary event reserved for entrepreneurs, inventors, and risk-takers. The truth is far less dramatic.

Failure isn't an accomplishment. It isn't a badge of honor, nor is it the opposite of success. It's simply the most common feedback mechanism in the human experience.

Once you accept that, failure becomes a little less frightening. Not because it hurts any less, but because you finally stop mistaking it for the end of the story.

Have a great weekend -gerry