Jeff Bezos has one of my favorite paradigms on failure.

He describes two types of failure:
1. Truly trying something new, you haven’t done before, and it fails.
2. You’ve done the task or project before, and it fails.

Jeff is incredibly comfortable with failure, if it’s failure from innovation.

Within the first type of failure another valuable distinction has been drawn to my attention.

Are we failing because 1) fundamentally the idea is bad or 2) because we’re executing poorly.

Because it’s very difficult to discern when an idea is fundamentally bad, I’ve thrown together a brief outline of a few ways to check the status of your ideas.

1. Run it by a high judgment person, or even better someone on your wisdom table!
2. Ask yourself the following questions:
   Do I want to do this?
   Can I do it?
   Do people want it?

Truth be told, you’ll never be able to relay completely on any metric to weed out the bad ideas or find the good ones, so proceed with an open mind.