Moonshots and missing the stars

02 April 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by 9to5google.com

I read this article about Google[x]'s mission to take moonshots. He, Astro Teller, refers to moonshots as what JFK did in 1961 when he said we were going to be the first country to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Moonshots are those huge, wild goals like going to the moon.

Astro Teller talks a lot about failure and how important it has been in his career to fail sooner rather than later. He built something for seniors and then when they were done, had some seniors come in so they could ask if they would use one. All the seniors said no. What took them months to build was useless because no one would use it.

He said how he could have found out in a couple days what it had taken them months to learn. He says he learned how important it was to get the hard learning done first. He also said that if you don't do the hard learning first, you'll tend to shy away from the hard learning because you don't want to know the answers—because you worked so hard on your project.

Later he says:

What we’ve learned is that the only way to make progress is to make a ton of mistakes — to go out and find and even create negative experiences that help us learn and get better

He also talks about three different kinds of failures: failures that are actually features (for very early testing), failures that you can learn from, and failures that are just the cost of doing something awesome (that you don't learn much from).

He also said that failures don't have to be "not success." They can also be, "we tried that and it didn't work. Now we know more than we did yesterday."

This was a very cool article that talked a lot about their current and failed projects. The way they've gone about these really cool projects that push our understanding of the world and ability in many fields is really fascinating. It's long, but it's a really cool read if you're into those kinds of things.

So get out into the real world, learn stuff, and try to fail. That's the only way to know if you're on the right path or if you need to change. "You can't do that in a conference room," as Astro Teller says.