When I first arrived to San Francisco, I was very fortunate to work at a tech startup in the heart of the city. It was unlike any job I had ever had. There was more work than there was time in a day. There were no corner offices or cubicles. Suits and ties were swapped for skinny jeans and headphones, and there were 4 beers on tap in the office kitchen.

Startups are world-renowned for their radically different approach to business. They are lean, numbers-obsessed, and agile, turning around new products on a monthly or even weekly basis. Startups embrace risk in search of innovation, and have the luxury of being small enough to spend most of their time building and designing. While working in a startup I got to experience these and more unique attributes of startup life that I would argue are applicable to more than just building apps and coding webpages. Here are three top life lessons learned from a few months at a startup:

1. Measure everything. Metrics are at the heart of everything a startup does. If you can’t get the numbers behind it, you don’t know what you’ve accomplished. In a similar way, its helpful to use metrics to measure success in your everyday life. The more you make your goals measurable, the easier it will be to accomplish them. Recently, a friend convinced me to sign up for my first ever race. I had to run 10 kilometers across 1,000 feet of elevation gain– something I wouldn’t have dreamed of before. The only way I motivated myself to train was by using an app that tracked my mileage, pace, and elevation gain. Using metrics, I was able to tell how much progress I had made and was finally able to cross the finish line that day without collapsing in a heap on the lawn.

2. Fail fast and try again. A huge principle of startup culture is iteration. When I first started this job, I hadn’t even heard of the word before, let alone understood the concept behind it. Iteration means building something incrementally, testing it out, and then making changes until you arrive at a full-fledged product. If its a hit, great, if not, move on to something else. Similarly, in life, its okay to fail at something. Every time we fail is another opportunity to correct and succeed. Like the old adage goes, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

3. Execution is everything. The design team would constantly tell us “Ideas are worthless”, meaning that you can have all the brilliant ideas you want, but until they become reality, they are nothing. This might be the hardest life lesson for me personally. As a marketer, I thrive on my good ideas, but until I can turn them into something tangible, they might as well have never existed. Learning that the execution phase is just as important as the ideation phase will be instrumental in getting yourself to the next level in any project you take on.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it is a few simple things that are easy to start doing in your career and everyday life to start reaching your goals, innovating more often, and ultimately getting things done.