Maybe if you can study failures, systematise, cluster them, find common patterns, causality, structure, then maybe you can go through incredible volume of failures...
Let there be more biographies of failures
131–140 of 155 posts
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#132Maybe if you can study failures, systematise, cluster them, find common patterns, causality, structure, then maybe you can go through incredible volume of failures...
Most startups fail because they are too early.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#133The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail. So from a pov of looking to reduce my chances of failure, reading about a failure means there are now Inf - 1 ways I might fail, not too useful. Pragmatically reading about success and seeing if I can repurpose their techniques to my situation is far more useful. Where reading about failure is useful is to help remove the general stigma around failure that…
If there exist infinite ways to fail, why would there not also exist infinite ways to succeed?
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#134Henry Petroski has written several excellent essays and books about engineering failures, why it is inherent in engineering pursuits that there will be failures, why it is important to learn the right lessons from these failures, and why each new generation will forget past lessons. Start with: "To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" (1985)
My thinking is that many of the kinds of engineering failure stories you refer to are about the failure, itself, or the victims of the failure (Therac-25, for example), but not often primarily about a single individual's life of failure (or even a single individual's sole role in a failure). They might also be about the engineering teams/groups involved (Challenger explosion) and sometimes about a specific engineer (…
Life is full of failure. Write a a memoir and reframe it.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#135One confounding factor is that people don't fail alone (or succeed alone) - at least in anything really interesting.
So to really dig into failure it is not enough for an individual to share - the culture around the person needs to share and support the discussion. Otherwise the failure sharing effort is doomed to failure. (Post mortem culture is a bit of an answer here but difficult to initiate).
I think this is why the classic tragedies have withstood the test of time - they generalize failures wise people have witnessed and are great learning material (with surface entertainment as bonus!). I strongly recommend reading some of them with the perspective of being a student of human behavior.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#136the problem with wanting to write biographies of failures is the same problem with publishing negative results in science: there are too many failures, and too many ways to fail. It's like entropy - there are so many ways to do something wrong that it's not very efficient to learn how to do something by enumerating all the ways you cannot do it. Much rarer is success, which is why it's more worth the time to study. M…
This sounds adjacent to the Anna Karenina principle: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#137the problem with wanting to write biographies of failures is the same problem with publishing negative results in science: there are too many failures, and too many ways to fail. It's like entropy - there are so many ways to do something wrong that it's not very efficient to learn how to do something by enumerating all the ways you cannot do it. Much rarer is success, which is why it's more worth the time to study. M…
Biographies of failures are not the same as negative results in science. A negative result has value and it may not be as sexy as a positive result but should be published if not for anything more than to prevent other people from going down the same path or to add more data in meta studies. Also, negative or positive depends on how the original hypothesis is framed. One person could claim that X has no effect on Y as the null hypothesis, and another could claim that X has an effect on Y, and the same results would give a positive result for one, and negative for another.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#138One good field with a lot of “failure stories” is military history. Even the most successful commanders, say Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, or Kublai Khan, tended to fail often or conclusively.
Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#139Re: Let there be more biographies of failures
#140The biographies of "successfull" people are full of failure already. Stefan Zweig committed suicide out of despair in 1942. Stalin, undeniably successfull, was a depressive paranoid maniac. Blaise Pascal renounced math and lived in a religious convent. The author provides their own example!
Reading biographies makes me feel deeply satisfied with my boring, stable life. Biographies help with that perspective precisely because so very few of those who make it into the pages of history managed to achieve that dream.