Mulligan

One of the best ways to fail is early.

If you’re going to screw up, it’s great to screw up at the very beginning of a project or endeavor. Because then, you’ve usually expended a very minimal amount of juice and so the waste is at its lowest point. You haven’t sunk anything in yet, so there’s little to lose by failing.

This means you should do your riskiest or hardest parts of any undertaking at the very beginning. If there’s something that’s especially difficult, it’s better to do it – and possibly fail at it, learning along the way – as early as you can. If you do, it’s easy to learn from your mistake and try again fresh. If you put of the trickest parts until the end, you’re tying all your previous work to the risk.