No matter how hard you try, how well you test, and how smart you are, you are going to screw up. I could probably just close this post saying that, but for some reason, people don’t like to accept failure as an option. We don’t want to do anything but succeed and think that we can get everything right, the first time, and every time.
“Well … you can’t!” as Mal told Jayne. You can’t get it right every time, and you’re probably never going to get it right the first time, mostly because it is the first time. Failure is an important aspect of progress, which we all know, and we’ve all heard, so I won’t delve into that. What I do what to do is remind you how to move from failure. What are your takeaways and what do you do next?
When software fails, the first thing you do is look at the error. I like to describe things in the plainest English possible: I entered in my email, clicked ‘submit’ and my webpage turned into a blank white page.
From experience, I know that a blank white page is often a PHP error, but by presenting it to myself in straightforward terms, I now know what to search for if I didn’t know that already. Search engines have come a long way in a short time, and if I search for ‘wordpress blank white page’ I get a lot of hits about the ‘White Screen of Death.’ Now I’ve learned a new term and I’ll file that away for later searches. Awesome to know. Now that I’ve found what the problem is (PHP) I can look into debugging. I can read the PHP error logs, or in the case of WordPress, turn on debugging to see if anything gets output.
The point to this is that finding an error is the first step in learning. I take what the error is, what the failure is, and I go forward. Failing isn’t a stop, it’s a pause in the process. Too many people take failure as a sign to stop everything, and while yes, failing does mean you’re doing_it_wrong() somewhere in there (or perhaps you’re not doing it as well as the next guy), and sometimes it does result in scrapping everything and starting over, it remains a sign to look at what you’re doing, not to stop entirely. When you don’t know the software well, or the tools, or anything at all, that initial failure of ‘It’s broken’ can be hard to overcome. The fear of failure keeps you from just taking the next step of ‘What do I do?’
Once you’ve sort out what your problem is, learn from your failure and pass it on to the next guy. The reason a lot of people hate forums is that someone asks a question and either never replies, or leaves a ‘fixed’ message with no explanation. That makes it impossible to learn from the fail for the next guy, and you force them to reinvent the wheel.
I’m all for learning by doing, but progress happens because we share the answers. Pretty much all school is for a lot of people is memorizing the answers, which has it’s place. The rest of us learn the theory from seeing the path. We see the start, the fail, the middle, and the win, and it’s that journey that teaches us where to go next and invent new things.
Comments
2 responses to “Failure Is Always An Option”
I discovered a long time ago that the secret to success is failure. Failing a LOT allows you to treasure those moments when you succeed.
I’m with you, however, on not sharing the ‘hows’ of your successes with others, particularly in the case of open forums where it was _you_ in fact who opened the conversation! It brings to mind a Winston Churchill quote (which I’m probably butchering) that was something like, “If you have the knowledge, you should let the others light their candles with it.”
Thanks for sharing your views on failure. Here is a good video (with slides) on “why one needs to fail“.