If there’s one thing I learned in this web 2.0 world, it’s “fail fast”.

If there’s one thing I learned from my asian parents, it’s “failure is not an option“. I hated my parents for this growing up, but I’ve come to appreciate it.

When you go into something knowing that there’s no option to fail, you hustle in ways that the less paranoid never would. The impact of this is incredible, and I think that a good way to increase your chances of succeeding is to find ways to make it so that failure is as far from an option as possible.

This means burning all of your ships: leaving school, quitting your job, and telling everyone you know that you’re working on a startup. Since taking grant and investment money from numerous people, I’ve felt a personal pressure to push forward that I hadn’t before. I’m obliged not to fail, and my productivity is noticeably stronger now.

A few things that I don’t approve of:

1) People who do “consulting on the side“. These almost always fail, because the entrepreneur isn’t in a sink-or-swim mentality. They justify it by citing how much money they make through such little work, and that’s all true. But no matter what, at the end of the day, the entrepreneur is giving him or herself the permission to screw up the company and go back to the financial security that freelance consulting provides. I say they burn their ships and focus on what they actually care about.

2) Doing school while building a company. It doesn’t work at all. I tried it back in middle school, I tried it in high school, and I tried it as a junior and senior at Berkeley. Even if you say that you don’t care about your grades, it doesn’t matter, because you’re inevitably going to lose productivity and give yourself more permission to fail. As Paul Graham says in one of his essays that student entrepreneurs can always go back to school and discount their failure as a side project that didn’t go anywhere. And that’s why it makes me cringe when I hear my classmates applying to grad school or jobs so that they have a “backup option”.

Which brings me to the worst offender:

3) Keeping your job, making business a “side-thing”. This implies that you won’t quit the security of your job until there’s traction or investment funding, yet you’re not going to find either unless you’re working day and night on your startup. It’s a catch-22, and something has to give. I remember meeting people last year who said they were working on a startup, yet keeping their jobs in the meanwhile. They said that they were “considering leaving their job”, which meant that they were too scared to do so. A year later, they’re still in the same job, and their startup didn’t go anywhere.

The main critique to burning one’s ships is that you’re incurring huge risk by doing so. If you don’t have any backup options, what happens if and when your company fails? If I had to answer, I’d say that it won’t come to that, because you forfeited all permission to fail by leaving your backup options on the table. But realistically speaking, it’s not that bad. You’re a great engineer working on your new startup, but Google’s trying to recruit you to work there. Tell them to go away, and they’ll probably be back in the event that your company fails.

Now proactive things you can do to decrease your permission to fail:

- Telling everyone you know about your company. Every time you see friends, they’ll ask you “how’s your company doing?” And you’re going to want to have good things to say.

- Join an early stage accelerator program like YCombinator or TechStars. I think this is critical, because you feel an immense amount of pressure to stay on top of all of your peers. You want to save yourself the embarrassment of having a crappy product to show for, and you don’t want to let down your earliest backers. Because they’re counting on you.

To sum this all up, it comes down to one thing: psychology. There’s an incredible psychological impact of knowing that you can’t fail, and it’s artificially tapping into your evolutionary instincts. If you perceive that you’re about to get killed, you’re going to work that much harder to stay alive.