In the 2010s, Amazon launched a phone. It was a spectacular failure. When a journalist asked CEO Jeff Bezos about it, Jeff replied, “If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now — and I am not kidding. Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.”

Jeff believed that making mistakes was a natural part of making these bets. At Amazon’s scale, there was no such thing as a small mistake—every mistake would be relatively big. And with enough attempts, a small number of successes will pay off for the many failures.

Google has figured out a similar dynamic. Killed by Google is a directory of all of the projects that Google has sunset, including its Chromecast product.

When you start off early in your career, other people assign you clearly defined, small, projects. They probably even give you instructions. But as you gain more experience and earn more responsibility,  you’ll be expected to initiate projects and tasks in response to problems and goals. 

Your customer, client, or boss will tell you what they want, without knowing how to solve it. You’ll need to figure it out yourself.

When you make this shift, you’re going to start failing more—just like the teams at Amazon and Google. It’s not because you’ve gotten worse. It’s because the problems are much more difficult to solve, and that one bet paying off could make up for the rest failing.

Making this psychological and emotional transition—from a near-100% success rate when you’re a junior, to a lower success rate as you’re a leader—is critical. A team that sets you up to succeed will also be comfortable with you failing every so often.