I fail lots

July 17th, 2008

Well, I do…

At least 2 – 4 times / month

However

I also learn 2 – 4 things / month that don’t work

I only recently realised that

I have become so accustomed to failure that I bounce back virtually instantaneously

Weird

but awesome! this means I am willing to give anything a go.

Chances are the cost of doing it outweigh the cost of not doing it…

plus every now and again i come up with something brilliant!

this blog being one of them ๐Ÿ˜‰

so go ahead

try some crazy ideas, fail lots and win sometimes.

(believe me, you’ll soon forget the failures, learn the lessons and win overall!)

(and you’ll get better at minimising risk and limiting the downside)

(oh and once your no longer afraid of failure the world is your oyster)

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 5:57 pm. feed



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3 Responses to “I fail lots”

  1. scollings Says:
    July 17th, 2008 at 6:33 pm

    This is a lot like the approach at my current contract, I’m doing prototyping, where if the thing works then great, however if it fails then great to. The learnings are usually way more important than the actual delivery. See Note1 and Note2 below for context.

    Using prototyping allows you to do 1 thing multiple ways really quickly and then pass that learning into the product development. That way, product developers can see different ways to do the same thing and take the bits they want and leave stuff that may have been specified into the product that don’t work.

    Note1: prototypes are made to be thrown away anyway – helps to not get precious about it ๐Ÿ™‚ .
    Note2: I feed all learnings into product development so they don’t make the same mistakes).

  2. Matt Says:
    July 20th, 2008 at 1:46 am

    Yes, your are right a lot people (myself included) don’t try out new ideas because they fear failure. Even though failure is as important, if not more important than succeeding.

  3. Ben Young Says:
    July 20th, 2008 at 9:30 pm

    @scollings Agile development is a fantastic evolutionary model. Next step could be to look at what 20% of the development delivers 80% of the results. Could be room for improvement.

    @Matt Once you get into the knack of it, it becomes quite a streamlined process.

    Food for thought ๐Ÿ™‚



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