If you’re a job seeker today, you’re the Chief Everything Officer of a tiny entrepreneurial company known as “Me, Inc.”

Glenn Livingston, one of my ‘paper mentors’ as an entrepreneur has a mantra for smart entrepreneurs:

“Fail fast, fail cheap, and get to what works quickly.”

When I initially heard that, my reaction wasn’t positive. I mean, who likes to fail? Like you, I grew up in the corporate world where they have a different mantra. The corporate world trains us that failure is not acceptable, that if we make the same mistake more than once we’re probably not cut out of the right cloth.

Even though people fail regularly, day in and day out, we’re conditioned to cover it over, not let anyone catch us and take risks only when we’re assured of the outcome.

(This despite thousands of stories – like Thomas Edison’s – about how companies and great new products got started precisely BECAUSE someone was willing to fail over and over again until they got it right.)

Heck, most political garbage in a company comes from people trying to cover themselves from a past, current or future failure. After all, they tell us what to do. And often how to do it. When you think about it, they just want what the teacher in 6th grade wanted – for us to regurgitate the answers they think are right. If we can’t do it, we’re “bad.”

The problem with that mentality comes you’re suddenly acting in open space, with no rules or acceptable steps to success. Like when you’re an entrepreneur. Or a job seeker in a market like today’s, when the things that got you a job even five years ago are no longer working.

For most job seekers, today’s market is like walking through a house, flipping light switches and moving the slider on the thermostat when there’s no electricity – despite all the flipping and sliding, you’re still cold and in the dark.

That, my friend, is precisely the moment when you have to start failing as fast as you can. It’s a conscious choice my clients find themselves making if they’re going to be successful. They finally come to see the truth:

I can sit in the dark and cold and hope the electricity comes back on, but eventually I’ll either get tired of it or freeze to death.

Or I can start figuring out how to make fire.

For some people that would be a simple task, but others have only seen fire made from nothing in a movie or television show, or read about it in a book.

But here’s the secret power behind Glenn’s mantra – the faster you eliminate the things that DON’T work, the faster you can find a method that does. If you’re like me, there’s a lot of frustration, cussing and anger trying to figure things out (like when I do plumbing or electrical work around the house…just ask my kids…), but once you’ve done it, magical things happen.

1. You OWN the knowledge in ways book-learners don’t. After all, you can’t really learn to do anything by reading a book or watching a video, you have to do it! Imagine learning to ride a bike or swim from reading a book…not gonna happen. Remember in the movie “Castaway” when Tom Hanks’ character builds a fire from rubbing two sticks together? He dances around yelling, “Fire! I made fire!” That, my friend is true power.

2. You earn the luxury of time. Now that you can make fire one way, you can take your time practicing other ways that might be easier without freezing to death.

3. You earn the right to move on. Now that you have fire, you can move on to ways to protect and nurture it so that you don’t have to start from scratch again.

4. You get the added benefits of fire – like clean water, cooked food, the ability to signal passing ships or planes.

Job seeker – ask yourself:

Are you waiting for the electricity to come back on, or working on building fire?

How fast are you failing?

Think you’ll find a way to succeed before it gets dark and cold?

My program for starting fires as a job seeker in 2010