Not long ago, I did something unusual: I succumbed to fashion. This, however, was a particular type of fashion — nothing to do with buying a certain pair of jeans, or the latest phone. No, I did something far more trendy: I failed.
Failure is all the rage these days. The phrase Fail Fast, Fail Often — popularised in Silicon Valley — has become a mantra for many organisations. It is an appealing notion — if failure is inevitable then, by keeping those failures small, you can adjust and quickly correct course. Failure — once seen as a source of shame — is now perceived to be a necessary learning experience.
Learning is at the heart of this trend towards failure. Certain podcasters — such as the irrepressible Tim Ferriss — have embraced this idea, asking their guests about a favourite failure. In short, this is a low point that has actually led to success. The answers are often enlightening, such as the one from Terry Crews — the Brooklyn 99 actor, and general hulk of a man. Crews talked about taking an easy last-second shot in a high-stakes, high-school basketball game. Had he scored, glory would have been his. Of course, he clanged it, missing by miles. The lesson? He took the shot. Sure he was humiliated — mocked around school — but it was on his own terms.
Which brings me to my own clanged shot: Arduino. About six months ago I declared my intention to create something useful with Arduino. As you will have guessed, this did not happen. One night — about four months ago — I put the Arduino away … and it’s not come out since.
In that sense, I went against the industry mantra. Instead of living by fail fast, fail often, I failed slowly. Then I quit.
That act of quitting was my real failure. This new relationship we have with failure is all about encouraging action. By giving ourselves permission to fail, we aren’t held back in the same way. If you fail at your short-term goals, don’t sweat it — as Ariana Huffington puts it, failure is just a stepping stone to success. Crucially, though, you have to keep moving.
I have not kept moving. Arduino is getting dusty on the shelf, next to my once enthusiastically-bought guitar pick. At this point, I want to let myself off the hook, in true ‘failure is okay’ style. I want to shrug and — lying to myself — say “Hey, I tried”. But I can’t, because this failure still hurts. Which is good news. It means I can still learn from it.
The question, then, is how do I learn from failure? The general advice, straight from the Stoic’s playbook, might be to take the negative, and flip it for a positive. But that’s not enough — I want some actual steps to take. If I’m going to dissect my own failings, then I want a process, dammit.
Here, the programming community has come to my rescue, with the (fairly grisly-named) postmortem. A number of postmortem templates — such as this, from Keith Fahlgren — deal with the thorny subject of peacekeeping while a team rips its own work to shreds. This isn’t a problem for a one-person operation — I’m allowed to be brutal.
Step one: collect the facts of what happened.(At this point, I’m meant to remind myself that this is a calm place.)
The facts are not exactly thrilling, so I’ll keep this short. I plugged away at Arduino — literally and figuratively — for about 2 months. However, progress was slow. The fiddly stuff stayed fiddly. The tasks felt more and more pointless, almost childish. Eventually, my enthusiasm for the project completely died. That’s all there is to it.
Step two: figure out what went wrong. This is where I can unleash, so let’s do just that. When I started the Arduino project, I never really planned to succeed. Oh, I may have thought that I did, but my heart wasn’t really in it. That ‘enthusiasm’ I mentioned was always dubious.
How do I know this? For a start, I had a terrible, unconsidered target: “Make something useful”. That is the kind of shapeless aim that you would expect from someone feigning interest. It relied on enthusiasm to get me through the low points. What I needed was a real goal to work towards. Without that goal — that vision of success — I couldn’t plot a path. Hell, I couldn’t even plod a path. I had no path.
This all indicates that I hadn’t really done my research. I was expecting Arduino to be more like straight-up programming. In programming, even a complete beginner can make something usable (if not useful) from day one — be it a basic calculator, or a home-brewed version of Pong in Unity 3D. Arduino, as I found it, is harder than that. There is a lot of theory to learn, a lot of practical skill to acquire, and potentially a lot of kit to buy, before you end up with something to show off to friends. I did not have the necessary sticking power.
I need to qualify that last statement. I did not have the necessary sticking power for Arduino. As it turned out, my time and energy were dutifully focused on something else: writing.
The popular excuse “I don’t have time” is a fairly bunkum one. We all have plenty of time. What is really missing is priorities. I first learnt this with guitar. Guitar and writing took up the same time slot, and there was only room for one. Guitar had to go — it was the first victim of those priorities. And besides, should I choose to, I can still while away the evenings tinkling the old guitar twine. (Obviously I never did pick up the lingo.)
Arduino is simply the second victim. It did not become a priority.
Which brings me to the third step of this postmortem: Pick an actual improvement to make. This improvement has to be tangible, measurable, and achievable. In other words, it has to be an actual target. This is it: write 25 posts in 2018. It sounds simple, but I do not have much of a writing process. However, if this postmortem is successful, then that process should improve.
Perhaps it’s ironic that working on Arduino has, well, taken me further from Arduino. In that sense it was a failure. On the other hand, I now have a goal. If I have to keep chasing my own failures to achieve that goal, then so be it. Following fashion was never meant to be easy.