About
"Almost everything we're taught about failure is wrong."
Hey there!
I'm Aaron Dinin, and I teach entrepreneurship at Duke University. I also post lots of videos about it online that you've probably seen… even if you didn't realize it was me who posted them. (I get that a lot. Apparently my classes are very memorable, even if I'm not… which my therapist tells me not to be so self-conscious about.)
Before teaching, I started a bunch of companies. Some worked. Some… not so much. And somewhere along the way I became convinced that almost everything we're taught about failure is wrong.
Here's the short version: School spends eighteen-plus years training us to treat every mistake as a catastrophe, every red mark as a verdict, and every setback as proof something is wrong with us. Then we graduate into a world that runs entirely on uncertainty, rejection, and failure… and we're stuck wondering why we feel so unprepared for it.
Simply put, school's villainizing of failure does a bad job of preparing us for a world where failure is the most important tool we have for learning.
– Aaron
The book
Your biggest successes are going to look a lot like failure.
Once upon a time, I had long hair and a goatee and every intention of becoming the next great American author.
I actually wrote a novel shortly after graduating, but I couldn't get a publisher interested. I eventually self-published it on Amazon, where it went on to sell a grand total of zero copies. I thought my author dream was dead.
Turns out, it wasn't.
"Apparently, in the beginning, success looks a lot like failure."
Learning to Fail · Simon & Schuster · Launches March 2, 2027
Official bio
Dr. Aaron Dinin
Dr. Aaron Dinin teaches at Duke University. He's an entrepreneur, creator, and author known for helping people rethink their relationship with failure. He teaches popular courses including Learning to Fail, Asking Dumb Questions, and Building Global Audiences, where students learn through unconventional challenges, public experimentation, and the occasional deeply weird classroom assignment. A former startup founder with experience building multiple tech companies, Dinin combines academic insight, entrepreneurial scars, and a large social media platform to make failure feel less like a punishment and more like something worth understanding. His work has been featured on The Today Show, Bloomberg, WIRED, and even Cosmopolitan. His social media account reaches hundreds of millions of people each year.