Earlier this week I had the pleasure of speaking with Tara Rodden Robison (Twitter: TaraRodden), a long-time fellow GTDer and productivity coach based in Corvallis, Oregon.   Here is the result of that conversation, after Tara edited it to make me sound smarter and more handsome :-)

Go here to have a listen.

About the Failure Project

Today I am proud to announce The Failure Project.  The purpose of this project to help individuals and organizations stamp out perfectionism and thereby unleash their full creative potential.

In order to achieve this purpose, we will need to show people how to treasure failures as a valuable resource. So why on Earth would anyone want to pursue failures? Isn't success what we all want? Aren't failures what we seek to avoid? 

Failures are good for you, it turns out, if you can learn to use them proactively. In fact, if you can identify and pursue productive failures, the kind that yields a lot of learning with a relatively small amount of discomfort, you will grow and learn faster.  You will also most likely achieve more and go further than you otherwise would.

That's right, I am telling you to think in terms of pursuing failures.

Perfectionism is for sissies - for people afraid to fail.

If you think we've gone mad, take a look at the articles we have included here, originally posted on my blog at odegard.com.  

If you think we're onto something, we'd like you to participate:

• Submit a story.  You might want to share a story about a failure you have learned from.  Right now that's text-only, but we will soon support videos too.

• Take the seminar.  In our full-day seminar, you will learn about how to pursue and exploit failures in your life and in your work.  Our seminar is available on-site right now, but we are also working to schedule public seminars very soon, so stay tuned.

• Comment on our blogs here - we have two of them. One is for articles and the other for news announcements.  Let us know your thoughts!

• Join the discussion and follows us on Twitter .  We will be posting news updates, articles, and stories as @pursuefailures using the hash tag #pursuefailures.   Go here for a live update to see what people are saying on Twitter right now.

So.....NOW we'll see what happens!  

Frode L. Odegard, CEO
Odegard adVentures 
San Diego, California 

PS: I hope this project will be its own role model, so that with your participation we will all have lots of productive failures!