Learning to fail

"Fail faster, succeed sooner" - David Kelley

"Do not touch the hot plate!" And of course we did it anyway. But we learned from our mistake - something that is not so common anymore. 

Life is about learning, but when we were young we learned differently. We tried things out, we made mistakes, we failed, but we learned from it.  Somehow on the way to becoming an adult things changed. Suddenly failing was something really bad; remember when having a bad mark? The teacher was angry, mom was outraged and grandma had to pray 3 Hail Mary so the mighty Flying Spaghetti Monster won't be mad. As we started to realize that failing is not really a valid option anymore, we changed our behavior. So we tried to avoid the uncertainty, stopped to try things out or even started lying or blaming someone else. Making a mistake was really nothing you could be proud of.

However, you cannot change the fact that life is about learning. And when I started to read about The Lean Startup I was amazed by its focus on learning. And that failing experiments are totally fine, as long as it helps you somehow. It felt like failing was socially acceptable again.

In software development for example, bugs are a sort of failure. A common mindset however is to 'fix and forget'. What we should do is to sit down, take some minutes and try to figure out what actually happened: design issue, requirement misunderstanding etc. Thereby you can learn from it and it maybe won't happen again.

However, even failing needs to be learned. Before doing something new you should consider the following:

First, mitigate the risk. When you fail, does that mean you will die? Lose all your money? If you do not unit test that code snippet, will the product explode?

Second, invest just as little as necessary. The good thing about doing something new is that you get to know a lot, even with just little data.

Well, Happy Failing! :)

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