Fail fast

13 January 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by Peter at cartoon-excellence.com

Failure is great, right? That's what everyone thinks, I'm sure.

Honestly, there's a huge stigma around failure. School ingrains this into our minds. Failure is bad. Failure means you are a failure as a person. If you fail, people laugh at you. If you fail, you're a loser.

In creative endeavors, this couldn't be further from the truth. "We must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future." - Ed Catmull

If you create a fearless culture (or as fearless as human nature will allow), people will be much less hesitant to explore new areas, identifying uncharted pathways and then charging down them.

 And:

This is key: When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work—even when it is confounding them.

And:

When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It is counterproductive. 

He goes on to describe iterative trial and error—the scientific method—and says that "experiments are fact-finding missions that, over time, inch scientists toward greater understanding."

This subject is so crucial to sustained creativity and one of the main tenets of this blog. This is how you achieve the wandering part of a disciplined wanderer. It actually gets at both parts of the equation. The iterative trial and error is the disciplined wandering that I talk about.

It's the scientific method applied to creative projects.

You have to be willing to fail. Failure is not bad. It's just a step towards success. A necessary step. In order to be consistently creative over a long period of time, you must take risks, wander down an unexplored path and find out many times that it is the wrong way to go. You can't avoid that. There's no replacement for it, no way around it. You just have to take a wrong turn over and over and over again.

In general, I have found that people who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly. The overplanners [sic] just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed). There's a corollary to this, as well: The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it....It can be difficult to get free of it and head in a different direction. Which, more often than not, is exactly what you must do.

So go fail fast and find out that you were wrong.