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You can learn A LOT from failing!
The lessons, the insight and the education a failure can give are unlike any other. You can learn things about yourself that you never knew before! How you handle yourself under pressure. How to pivot quickly. How to survive a hard situation.
One of my biggest beliefs, if you fail, fail forward and fail fast.
One thing I realized about many people, they will say "I am thinking about doing XYZ". Instead of actually doing it. They are thinking about it, asking their friends, seeing how it feels, might be a few weeks before they actually try it.
Instead, I will say "I'm thinking about XYZ" and I will start on it right then. No delaying. If I fail, I want it to be fast. I don't want to waste all of this time and energy thinking about it before I even see if it is worth it.
Let me try TODAY and if this sucks, I don't want to spend more than a few hours on it to find out.
Some times the hesitation to the starting line is worse than the failure.
We build up this idea, this thought, and almost become intimidated by it. If I start right away, I don't give myself enough time to be intimidated by it. I'm in the act of doing. I am lazer focused to reaching a goal.
Don't psych yourself out. You are FAR MORE CAPABLE of the amazing things you THINK you can do. The only way you will find out though is if you take that first step.
Swift Action, Swift Results
If you delay an idea, getting tangible results will also be delayed. Think about that for a moment. You have this idea that you think is great. When you tell your friends about it, OF COURSE they say it is great! Isn't that funny how that works most of the time? Our friends don't want to hurt our feelings and they tell us something is great even if it isn't. When we finally try it, it is blatantly obvious that this was a bad idea but we took that reassurance from our friends that it was great! Sometimes, doing the action will show you right away that it was a bad idea. Don't delay the results! Swift Action, Swift Results! Find out if the idea actually has real merit. Everyone has a great opinion until it is time to purchase a product.
Cut the time on thinking about doing something and increase the time of actually trying it out.
Tech Conference
I wanted to throw a tech conference for my city. Never threw a conference before but I knew I really wanted to bring resources and value to people here. I approached many people with experience. Everyone said "This isn't a smart move. COVID just hit. It isn't a good time. You don't have experience." I was gutted. I really wanted to do this.
2 weeks go by and 1 person that I spoke with finally came back and said "If you really want to do this, if you really want to, I will spend some of my time to help you get this thing off of the ground."
I just looked back and said "oh, did... Did you think that I was going to stop doing this when everyone else said no? I already have all of the speakers, the software we will use to stream and organized the tracks." I realized with COVID, planning this was going to be significantly easier! I don't have to worry about the actual logistics of getting people there. When everyone said no, I wanted to see if I could actually do this but I wanted to fail fast. In doing so, I was able to make a conference that over 3000 people were able to enjoy!
I am not worried about you reaching a great level of success, I am confident you will.
I'm worried that you won't try something due to a fear of failure. There are lessons in those failures. But if you have to fail, fail fast.
Keep doing amazing things.
If you like this article, chances are you'd like what I tweet as well. If you are curious, have a look at my Twitter profile. Or check out my podcast - "Commit Your Code!" where I interview and talk to some phenomenal developers and motivate you to stay on the coding journey!
Latest comments (15)
Thanks for this article Danny.
Great article!
I was once in a planning meeting, where a Junior developer proclaimed "We can't do that - we have to write tests first, and there's no test coverage at all in the application, so it's going to take too much time for us to safely make that change!"
It just so happened that one of the Directors was present in the meeting, and his immediate reply was "Don't be silly, children learn to walk by falling over. Lets not be afraid of mistakes."
Or as I recently said to the same Director: "risk is just an opportunity in disguise."
Failing is definitely important and most people say their learn more from their failing than other times in their lives. I think it is important to not go into something without a plan or it will fail without the perceived success the idea originally had. So fail fast, but have at least a framework of a plan before you dive in.
It's important to note that there are LOTS of failures that can't be appraised as such in a few hours, days, weeks, or even, at times, months.
In any case, it's not just a matter of failing and moving on to something new. First of all, failing absolutely sucks, if you care about the thing that failed at all (and if you don't, your next thing will likely fail too). Second, you need to evaluate why you failed, so you can avoid making the same mistakes.
Don't dwell on them to the point of beating yourself up, but your failures deserve postmortems and recognition of the pain they cause.
this is a great article.
i really need this at this point in my life.
thank you Danny
I am glad you read it Vincent! Glad you found meaning and value in it!
Great article. Precise and useful.
Failure is an important aspect of life. If you are failing at something, that means you are moving forward in the learning/understanding process. It is the best motivation. When I fail at something, I get more motivated and give more effort than the previous time and get the work done. The only thing not to do is give up. 🙂✌
Love this Jayant! Thank you!
All the credit goes to you. You are doing a great job in helping and motivating newcomers as well as people who are already well established in their fields.👌
All the best. Waiting for more articles like this.🙂✌
Very relatable post. Thank you for this one Danny.
Thank you! Glad you like it!
This is a Great article, Danny.
Let us think how many times Steve Jobs fails until he gets the success that deserves and has in his mind ??
We all fail the magic is not to give up !!!!
Thank you! Glad you like it!
Great article Danny, straight to the point and very valuable information! 🔥
If you’re not successful doing XYZ once, you can get back up and try it again! 💪 Failing doesn’t exist as long as you’re learning.
I completely agree. Thank you Baran! Really glad that you liked the article!