Early on this month, I had the privilege to know an innovative Silicon Valley entrepreneur in the name of Eric Ries.

Eric Ries pioneered and popularized a new-business concept that he called The Lean Startup movement which has already been integrated and applied in many business strategies, small or large. Eric Ries stated that his mission is to improve the success rate of new innovative products worldwide, and he does it through the Lean Startup movement. To learn more about him and his Lean Startup movement, visit his website: Startup Lessons Learned

I feel fortunate to receive a copy of his book, The Lean Startup. After reading it, I have learned many valuable lessons that are useful in productivity and success, whether you are doing your own business or employed to other businesses.

Aside from doing a usual book review of The Lean Startup, which I will publish in the next days, I’ve decided to create separate articles on topics that I felt were valuable to learn and share. And one important lesson I’ve learned from the Lean Startup is the term, validated learning.

What is Validated Learning?

Eric Ries has stated in his book, The Lean Startup, the definition of validated learning is as follow:

Validated Learning is not after-the-fact rationalization or a good story designed to hide failure. It is rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which startup grows. Validated learning is always demonstrated by positive improvements in the startup’s core metrics.

In business, especially during startups, you will be faced with a lot of failures, no matter how great your ideas and visions are. Oftentimes, we conceal those failures by thinking and believing that they are learning. This is the common perception by the majority of people who wants to venture out and become entrepreneurs. They falsely believe that failure alone is a form of learning.

In his book, the Lean Startup, Eric Ries emphasizes the term validated learning. It encourages learning to be in a measurable form, like a metrics. Thus, failure isn’t enough measurement of learning unless such failure was used and has improved performance. Validated learning happens when you continue to test and improve your ideas or products, and it has resulted to positive change in your performance. Short to say, validated learning is measurable unlike the usual excuse of concealing failure as learning.

The same is true in our personal life, unless we measure and see the positive improvements in ourselves and in our lives, we can’t say and justify that we did have learned. Otherwise, we are blindly living with the belief that we have already achieved maturity and growth, yet we are constantly faced with problems and miseries that we don’t know how to handle.

Why Validated Learning is Useful in Business and Personal Life?

Whether you want to improve the performance of your business or your personal life, keep in mind the value of validated learning. Because unless you take time to constantly test and measure what works and what doesn’t, it will be hard for you to achieve growth in your business or your personal life.

The Lean Startup has more insights that I wish to share with you in my upcoming book review. But if you are eager to know more about it, on how it can help you improve your business or to learn something new about entrepreneurship and innovation, you may find out more by clicking the book image below:

I hope you have learned a valuable lesson today. I personally think that whether you are doing your own business or employed to work for a company, we all need to be more open and aware on new ways of doing things. Because the world has changed dramatically, general and traditional principles must be combined with new and innovative ideas, if you want to move forward in life with more productivity and success.

The Lean Startup is one of the innovative books that can teach you how to do so. Because the Lean Startup movement seeks to ensure that those of us who long to build the next big thing will have the tools needed to change the world.

For a final note, remember these advices from Eric Ries: