If you're not failing you may be succeeding.
If you're not failing you're not trying.
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: If you're not failing you're not trying.
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many times Chesley Sullenberger had to break a simulated plane in half before he could land a real one in the Hudson River.
Not the point. Even if he never trained for that specific instance before, he was ready for failure. When things went wrong, he didn't lose his cool or panic. He was ready for things to go wrong even if he wasn't expecting it. By failing all of the time during training, he conditioned himself to not be upset about failure.
I was agreeing by offering a real example of frequent failure leading to success.
Re: If you're not failing you're not trying.
#33Real world example: Rock Climbing There are two basic approaches to route climbing with ropes: "Traditional Climbing" with removable gear placed as the rock allows and the potential for injury if you were to fall, and "Sport Climbing", with closely spaced fixed gear, where falling is a matter of course. "Trad" climbers will often go years, decades, entire careers without ever falling off the rock. "Sport" climbers wi…
Unfair comparison - falling as a 14 year old is a whole different thing than falling at age 30 or 40, not just from body size and weight.
Re: If you're not failing you're not trying.
#34I find the notion of failing as something that should be aspired to worrisome. Often the cost of failure is too high. You don't want an airliner-pilot to seek failure. If banks make a big mistake and we slide into recession, people loose jobs, should we pat them on the shoulder for trying? What about the judge that sends an innocent man to prison? What about the solider that accidentally shoots an unarmed man? Can we…
A good engineering team will design with various simultaneous failure modes in mind. I've never ever seen this mindset on the business side.
Re: If you're not failing you're not trying.
#35Real world example: Rock Climbing There are two basic approaches to route climbing with ropes: "Traditional Climbing" with removable gear placed as the rock allows and the potential for injury if you were to fall, and "Sport Climbing", with closely spaced fixed gear, where falling is a matter of course. "Trad" climbers will often go years, decades, entire careers without ever falling off the rock. "Sport" climbers wi…
Unfair comparison - falling as a 14 year old is a whole different thing than falling at age 30 or 40, not just from body size and weight.
Fair comparison. 40 year climbers with 5 years experience and a willingness to push themselves to failure routinely climb harder than 40 year old climbers with 25 years experience gained climbing without falling.
Falling onto a dynamic rope is not in any way traumatic, even to an old guy like myself. The equipment really is that good. A 10 foot lead fall into space is nowhere near as demanding on the body as, say, a lay-up in Basketball.
Re: If you're not failing you're not trying.
#36The "fail fast" meme is useful for me only when followed up with "deliberate practice", so I don't fail again.
Re: If you're not failing you're not trying.
#37If you're not failing you may be succeeding.
or you aren't doing anything.
Re: If you're not failing you're not trying.
#38It is important to differentiate between
* Catastrophic failures: You fail so bad that you have no option but to trash everything and start again
* Detectable / Manageable failures: You fail, but this failure is not central to your existence, so you simply try again
While there are some cases where you have no option but to risk catastrophic failures, manageable failures are something people completely miss.
Fitness / Weight training has all sorts of examples of this, the goal is to identify the limits of your abilities and to push this limit, without risking permanent damage.
Consider this: Blogger (Pyra Collab tools), Flickr (GNE), Twitter (Odeo), Nokia Phones (losses for first 15 yrs), Google (initial focus was Enterprise Search until Adwords / Adsense acquisition) were all pushing the limits, and failing, but not so spectacularly that they didn't have resources left to pivot.
Identifying the difference, and the ability to contain possibly-catastrophic errors into manageable pieces is the true art of the startup.
Re: If you're not failing you're not trying.
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the point. Even if he never trained for that specific instance before, he was ready for failure. When things went wrong, he didn't lose his cool or panic. He was ready for things to go wrong even if he wasn't expecting it. By failing all of the time during training, he conditioned himself to not be upset about failure.
I was agreeing by offering a real example of frequent failure leading to success.
Actually he failed, we could say that he crashed the plane into the Hudson River. It's a matter of measure. If he ever do it again, he might do even better ;).
I think that we improve continuously from failure into something that looks more and more like success. Success is very relative to what you are able to accomplish at a time. If failing teach you something, might be it's a success ?
Re: If you're not failing you're not trying.
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was agreeing by offering a real example of frequent failure leading to success.
Actually he failed, we could say that he crashed the plane into the Hudson River. It's a matter of measure. If he ever do it again, he might do even better ;). I think that we improve continuously from failure into something that looks more and more like success. Success is very relative to what you are able to accomplish at a time. If failing teach you something, might be it's a success ?
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