Thinking Out Lout: Failing Forward - Get it wrong to get it right

Sometimes you have to get it wrong to get it right. Being scared of being wrong freezes you and prevents you from learning.

I'm sometimes told I learn fast, but what I really do is get stuff wrong really fast until I get it right -if I ever get it right-. I do a lot of experiments and little projects. I try stuff out and many times it just doesn't work. Until it does.

The Invisible Learning Process

The thing is that most of the time people don't see—or don't want to see—the failed tries. Somehow they are blind to the learning process and just see the result. But that result is, in reality, the consequence of many trials and errors until I get it right.

One example is all the how-to articles on this site. If I had gotten it right the first time, I wouldn't need to write it down. After all, I was right on the first try. If I found the solution to a problem quickly and easily, I wouldn't need to document it at all, because there was no effort required.

But what in reality happens is that I tried a lot of times before getting it right. Or that I forgot what I did before because I (wrongly) thought I would not forget and decided to not write it down. In most cases I read a lot of articles which, for my particular context, did not work on the first try. That's why I wrote it down in a way that I can use again in the future, should the same situation in a similar context arise. I just don't like to do the thinking and problem-solving twice, which is why I prefer to take the time to write it down (at least most of the time) instead of just trusting my memory.

Standing on the shoulders of others

And that's also why I link to references when I can or when I remember to write them down at the end of many articles on this site. I managed to solve something because someone else wrote it down, for whatever reason, somewhere for others to find. Be it a book, a forum, a mailing list, another personal website, it was out there for others to find. And given that I was able to find it, I managed to find one more piece to solve my puzzle. Maybe not the complete solution, but it adds up.

And sometimes just reading about how others think, or what others have tried also helps me in my research and problem-solving process. Reading is like talking and discussing with someone. It's seeing his or her thoughts on "paper." Sometimes in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way and sometimes as a structured written essay. In any way, it's an already-processed experience that is being made available for others to read and add to their "experience pool."

Building Your Experience Pool

And I think that part is interesting. Everyone has an experience pool, large or small. And I think the speed at which that pool grows and expands depends on two things: number of experiences and personal frustration-management.

The more you can allow and accept that you won't get it right the first few (or many) times and the more you are willing to keep trying (always within some limits) without getting frustrated, the more small (and big) experiences you add to your pool, the more "this-is-not-the-way-to-do-it" learnings you accumulate.

And what we sometimes fail to understand, or fail to see, is that those small experiences later relate to each other and make the pool. And when you get into it, you will not be asking about the origin of each individual drop. You will just swim and enjoy and make use of the water that's in the pool.

It's the same with experiences. Once you have them and accept them, it won't matter if they were "fails" or "rights." They will just be experiences, drops of water that make up your pool. And that pool will always be there in moments of need.

So, like I said at the beginning: sometimes you have to get it wrong to get it right, failing forward, so to speak.

Have you thought about experiences that way?