Pillars of Literature: The Darwinian Engine · 2:35pm Jul 20th, 2014
Howdy, Garnot here. It's been a few good weeks since I last made any public appearance. The last time you all saw me, I was in pretty dire financial issues. It was so bad, in fact, that I was moved to ask for help, an act that left me feeling very sour due to my self-reliant nature.
However, many of you answered the call. In doing so, you showed me kindness few have in my life. It's no exaggeration when I saw that quite a lot of my faith in people was restored thanks to all the donations I received. I'm happy to say that because of that, I have now started to recover. In a month's time, I'll begin a new job I found thanks to the encouragement of many of you, and as such, will no longer be in a position to request aid. Instead, I will be able to begin providing aid again.
There are just too many people to thank. So I'll just give everyone a big great 'thank you' from the bottom of my being. I will find a way to pay you all back one day.
Now, I guess I should give out a bit of news before I get this blog going. First of all, I want everyone to know that my home situation has improved. I now have a place to call my own again, even if there are some current limitations. My landlord's (stepfather) has finally found it in his heart to at least allow me to live back in my little shed thanks to the new job starting in August. He has made it clear that at the first sign of unemployment, I am back out. Not that it matters, for if the job goes well, I will be moving out to a nearby location to be at a better job location. I just have to endure one more month now.
Due to my most recent situation, I was unable to properly get any writing done. Thankfully, that's coming to an end now. I will soon be able to focus again on putting out work. The first thing I'll be doing is overhauling the piece that was originally meant to be for Ob's "Most Dangerous Game" contest. Sadly, I could not submit due to missing the deadline, the reasons being I was on the streets at the time. Made it rather difficult to write when I had to sit in a park or a busbench. Regardless of that, I will be overhauling the story. Hopefully, I can turn it into something more presentable than the mess it currently is.
Those interested in seeing what the story looks like right now can click on this Gdoc file here: Merchant
I was also going to post a bit about how my good friend ToixStory needed aid, but it seems like she has already more than gotten the necessary help, so I will just wish her good fortune. She and I will resume work on our ongoing story in the very near future. Expect a story to be posted in the coming weeks.
Another story you should be looking out for is a collab that has been ongoing with Flint Sparks. That one is just about complete—if not quite up to the standards I would find acceptable, though. Again, keep an eye out for it in the coming days.
Harbinger is a story that will be happening soon as well. Expect it in the very near future as well. Fifth is still getting its overhaul, and there are a few other stories in the works that, admittedly, would have seen a lot more progress had I not been thrust into the streets as I was. For that, I apologize.
Also, Magic Man, if you are reading this, I still have to give your story a read and review. Expect that in the coming days as well.
Now, without further interruptions, here is the blog piece. The next part in the pillar's series. Enjoy.
Darwinian Engine – Learning how to fail in order to succeed
“Fail Faster” is a mantra that has recently made the rounds in many business, start-ups, and creative groups. It is, at its core, the idea that in order to make something that approaches greatness, the creators have to be ready and willing to accept their potential failure at the venture.
It is common knowledge among many creative thinkers that the first attempt at any work will almost always turn out to be less than adequate. Unless the creator is a prodigy or extremely lucky, he or she will have to most likely return to the drawing board to draft something new. This goes double for a group effort, which usually involves more than a single mind working on any given problem, compounding the nature of the work in need of fixing. When failure becomes evident, the individual or group loses drive, more so if the failure arrives at a later stage in development—or worse, the failure does not become apparent until the product has been shipped, a stage by which it could prove disastrous for the product or work in question.
Going by the above statement, one would be expected to fear the notion of failure. In fact, I have personally spoken to many fellow writers and editors (a few on this site) that are absolutely terrified of the notion of failure. They see the prospect as the end-all for their work, and become so consumed by the feelings of worthlessness that arise with the notion of failure that they often end up abandoning work to its own devices, if not outright rejecting it and doing whatever they can to distance themselves from it. When the failure is even more pronounced, like say in a published story being found lacking for development reasons (E.I, story planning, character flaws, plot holes, and other aspects which I myself am rather familiar with), the author will find himself at an ever greater stage of despair, allowing himself or herself to be swept up by said feelings, thus resulting in his downward spiral into negative emotions that will often lead to further failures, and the likely abandonment of the project as a whole.
On the flip side of the above statement, you have those who enjoy success at a rate far greater than most—the prodigies and lucky SOBs that have just about everything handed to them without really having to work hard for it.
On the surface, it would appear like they have everything happening for them. They create something, and said something instantly garners success regardless of flaws. They decide to work on a group project, and said group project instantly becomes beloved and lauded. To these individuals, the notion of failure is as far-fetched of a notion as the gap between a wealthy and a beggar.
The attitude at display is very harmful, however. On the surface level, it may all be a success, but deep down, these individuals are setting themselves for a fall, the reason being that they do not understand how failure works, thus, when said aspect does come around, it hits the harder. Often, it leads to a spiral decline that results in the total dismantling of the individual’s persona at a base level, the results of which can be disastrous.
Another, more subtle aspect is that those that rarely—if at all—deal with failure plateau much quicker than those that are constantly assaulted by failures. Without failure, there is no desire to improve, plain and simple. Why reach for the stars when you everything you can want is right where you are? In the end, it leads to a state of stagnation that, when compounded with inevitable failure, results in a double-whammy effect that can tear down even the hardiest individual.
There is a question that has lingered for some time now. Just why are people so prone to fearing failure? Why is society as a whole so fixated with being the best the first time around despite the evidence that such a goal is nigh impossible for the average individual?
I believe the fault lies with the learning institutions of most the civilized world. As developing civilizations, we worry less about learning from our mistakes, and instead focus more on getting things correct the first and only time we attempt them. Every test, every assignment, every single assignment we have ever been given from the time we were in diapers to the time we walk on the graduation stage of high school has revolved around failing or passing. We are given a grade for our work, and told that we are either adequate for the outside world, or simply spinning our wheels in a task we have no hope of ever mastering. All we have to go by is what we learn in the classroom or what we read—assuming we are even lucky enough to have that. Sometimes, some of us face challenges that prevent us from learning in the 'standard' way, while others just have other methods of learning. Some learn by doing (such as myself), while others learn by seeing or hearing. The method of learning does not take into account the fact that a grand majority of people learn far more from trial and error rather than memorization and regurgitation of information. There is no chance to learn from the mistake. Get a grade and enjoy knowing you have no way to improve on the work you've already done—because your score has been given and you are supposed to be happy with either having been found worthy, or lacking.
The ability to accept failure as not only the best possible outcome for a work that has yet to be completed is perhaps one of the greatest and healthiest virtues one can have. It not only prepares for a lifetime of harsh decisions and even harsher shortcomings, but it also encourages the acceptance of said shortcomings as the means to improvement. Nothing will ever reach true perfection. It is, after all, our nature to be imperfect as human beings. However, being accepting of your present and eventual shortcomings and being able to accept them is not only a healthy attitude to have in our ever-evolving world, but it is also the means to reach beyond the now. The sooner you fail and accept that failure, the sooner you will be on the road to improvement.
If you are one of the people that know very little failure and feel you are not getting anywhere, then I urge you to start failing more by pushing yourself past what you have set yourself as the ‘standard.’ Push the boundaries and envelopes around you, and be ready and willing to accept the failures to come as the means to better yourself. It may be painful at first, but the results are well worth it.
Believe in yourself, and never stop pushing forward. Do not fear failure. Embrace it.
On a side note to this blog, I want to announce that in the very near future, I will be creating a group that takes and expands on the idea of the Darwinian Engine. The idea will be to form a small gathering of individuals that either experience failure on a regular basis and have yet to learn to embrace it, individuals who rarely fail and feel they are not getting anywhere, or worse, have become so rigid in their mindset so as to avoid potential failures and downfalls, or anyone who wishes to better learn how to accept failure.
If all goes as planned, the group will be dedicated to the sharing of ideas in an environment that rewards those who are willing to accept their shortcomings and is ready to learn from them. The more people we have on board, the better It will be, as there will be more opportunities to share ideas, test-run stories, characters, and themes, and more rapidly get to the source of what ultimately works, and what doesn’t.
Just so we are clear, this is not a group for those seeking editing help. This is not a group for those seeking praise and promotion. This is not a group for those that aren’t willing to aid others. This is a group where you will share your idea, and watch it be torn to shreds mercilessly. This is a group in which you will experience failure of all levels. This is a group in which you will learn to accept said failures, learn from them, and thus improve your story in ways that you never really thought possible.
If you feel like you are the kind of individual who can both aid others in this task, as well as be ready and willing to put your own ideas and works on the line, then send me a PM so I can give you further details. I hope to see a few of you on board this task. Until then, have a good day.
Hey, glad to see you're back, man.
As much as I can find matches to myself in there, it has one fatal flaw that isn't being addressed at all. It's implied that "with failure comes success eventually". I don't buy that.
The reason why I don't want to try is because I fear that trying to push my boundaries will not change anything at all about my condition, thus only making it more miserable. If I knew that I would for certain succeed after a certain amount of time I wouldn't hesitate, but I don't want to risk the kind of failure that will be good for nothing at all in the end.
2301883
It seems that having "many failures" is at some point a shotgun effect. After so many failures, one should be a success, especially if the person failing is learning. It all seems to relay on probabilities.
In theory what you're saying is totally true. In practice, however, there are failures that drain us too completely to be of any actual benefit. It won't happen often, but when it does, something stronger won't be made of that individual. They will just break, and stop doing what they were doing. You could argue that the community as a whole will be stronger if those types of individuals stop working, but that hardly matters to the individual. But that is the whole basis for social Darwinism, isn't it? Weed out those who are unfit.
Not saying that we shouldn't fail. We need to learn how to do fail gracefully and correct mistakes. However, you shouldn't expect every failure to make a person better.
Also, the group you're making sounds like it'll be a breeding ground for trolls and bullies. You know the type: those who don't want to help others, but just want to insult and rip people down under the guise of 'helping'. Hope you've thought of precautions against that, otherwise you're gonna be setting up another 'Cutie Mark Train Wreck Crusaders'.
2302098
I am working on guidelines and precautions as I type this. That's the reason the group has not been created yet—too many variables that can go wrong.
Far as your other point goes, the group is meant to teach to fail with grace, yes. It is also about teaching the skill of never giving up. Anyone can better themselves with enough dilligence and practice. There is no such thing as a trully 'bad' writer.
2301883
This was touched upon in the skype chat. Suffice to say, the final say is yours.
2301741
Where have you been? Not heard from you in a while.
2302119
For awhile I was busy getting a story ready for the WotF contest, but now that that's done I've been working on Lulamoon, among other things.
2301883 I believe that you might be clinging to an answer, rather than being open to the correct question. Maybe 'success' isn't becoming a better writer, but realising you aren't going to get better. Maybe it means realising that you have some personal issues that need to be worked out so that you can get better at taking criticism. Maybe it means that you discover things that simply render writing less important than it was, whether you become a batter writer or not. maybe it means taking a long hard look at why you write at all so that you can better understand yourself, as Garnot did with me.
What I hear is that you are afraid to face reality, but you're not alone in that. Reality is scary when you're surrounded by people who will attack you for breaching their illusions, just as you hold on to yours to defend yourself from whatever your pains are. Whether you are fourteen or forty, you are under attack from all sides. You need people to support you in improving yourself – not just in the writing but real, emotional support.
And you are right to require that, but I ask you: if you're not able to take a risk on being honest with yourself about something as harmless as your writing, when are you?
It's not like you wouldn't be welcomed to come and watch and see if it is for you.
For what it's worth, I am deeply, deeply sorry for whatever it is that is making you miserable. I plan to hang around the group offer some insights on the nature of criticism and communication to ensure that the experience remains as compassionate and nurturing as possible. Don't take my word for it, ask Garnot how my skills are in this area, or better yet, ask wYvern.
2302098 Honestly, Darwinism is a poor comparison for this project, but only because it is misunderstood so widely. It's not 'survival of the fittest' – in fact, I seem to recall that the phrase doesn't even exist in the book – it's 'survival of the best adaptations'. This isn't about cutting away the chaff. That would be logical Darwinism. This is about redefining the experience of failure as something shameful and disempowering into something upon which dreams are realised.
Every failure can make a person better, but it's a choice you have to make and sometimes you need a little perspective to see how.
My advice to Garnot would be to either make it invite only, and thus keep the numbers manageable, of just to give me access to the eject button. Disrespect will not be tolerated.
-Scott 'Inquisitor' Mence
2302317
Hmm, you're not the first one to say there might be something wrong with me outside of the whole writing business. My self-esteem and confidence as a whole are complete jokes, and I've actually already thought about going into therapy for that.
And this also makes the answer to this question very simple:
Close to never.
And now I feel bad for hi-jacking Garnot's blog post for my misery.
2302396
Stop.
I'm going to say this in capitals:
THERE. IS. NOTHING. WRONG. WITH. YOU.
So how can you feel so bad if there is nothing wrong with you? Because defending yourself against others is normal and proper. The problem is that we're not the ones attacking you and your lizard brain can't distinguish real threats from phantom ones. I seriously doubt that this really has anything to do with your writing at all. Like most people here, you write as an escape. From what, I can't know, but I'm smart enough and knowledgeable enough to make a few guesses.
I won't, because it's completely inappropriate in public.
If you put a tiger in a cage and poke it with sticks, you don't get to complain if the tiger mauls you the second you open the cage door. It's simple cause and effect. However, if you give the tiger shocks every time it goes near the cage door, it will eventually never go near it again.
Some people get angry and lash out when mistreated. These people will find their way sooner or later, however fucked up their way is. They defend themselves aggressively, but isolation, emptiness, and likely jail, await them. Some people, however, turn that anger inwards to keep themselves from harm's way, and often to repress the immense pain of such an experience. This, my friend, is you – the nail that stands up gets beaten down. The real problem is that you're the one wielding the hammer, and I guarantee you've got to incredibly good reasons to do so.
Good writing = success = validation. It's a cycle that lots of people fall into, and it's a trap. Yet it's so tantalisingly close to working that it's almost impossible to walk away from. It's like an addiction: success is your drug. Anything that stands between you and success is like being denied your fix. Without your fix, the old pains creep in, and the desperation to do anything to avoid it gives rise to despair and depression: if you can't avoid the pain with targeted behaviour, the next stage is to shut all emotion down. You go numb.
You know this experience well, as do I. As does Garnot.
You are not alone.
It's all biology, really. The upside is that recovering from it is all biology, too. You're the one with the hammer now, which means you just need to learn how to put it down. Of course, that is both simple yet one of the most excruciatingly difficult things any human being ever has to do.
But you are not alone.
I bet you've never really had people who listen to you – I mean, really, truly, honestly, and compassionately listen. Sure, I bet people has sat there and let you speak, all the better to pepper you with personal opinions and cultural illusions, but listening is a skill few have learned. Listening requires empathy, and to be truly effective, genuine sympathy. You have not had these things – not enough of it, at least. I know this because it's cause and effect. For it to be otherwise is to expect rocks to forgo gravity and fly just for the shiggles.
You need someone to listen, though you probably don't even remember what it is you need to say. I cannot possibly recommend therapy enough, but if you need it, I can probably go a long way towards helping, if you want me to.
Because I can hear you. I can write all this because I can hear you. Between the lines, behind the words. I can hear you, and you have my deepest, most heartfelt sympathy. And I can tell you that Garnot hears you, too. We've spoken enough to know that he gets it.
Fanfiction may not be the final answer to your need for feedback, but it can be a way to learn about yourself, so long as it is among people who care – people who know how to listen. I for one am glad you took the time to post, and I'm sure the others are, too (back me up here, guys). In fact, I'd go as far as to say that how you feel is exactly the reason this blogpost even exists.
Maybe it's time to put the hammer away. And maybe, just maybe, it's time to give yourself a little credit for simply surviving this long with the incredible burdens I know you have carried.
You are not alone, and there is nothing wrong with you. You have just adapted to the circumstances of your life. Now you want more. That takes courage.
For that, you have my admiration, too.
-Scott
2302647
Due to lack of proper reply.
I’m afraid you’re missing something very important here, and your failure comes from the very start – you don’t understand what “fail faster” means at all.
Failing is bad.
Failing is bad. It represents a waste of time and material and equipment and whatever else you devoted to your failure.
Success is uncertain.
That is to say, you cannot be certain of your failure or success before you start a lot of projects.
Not all failures are equal.
Some failures are worse than others.
And this is where fail faster comes into play.
What does fail faster mean?
Fail faster is not actually about failing per se, but rapid iteration. It is about testing as soon as you have something which you can test. And it is about attacking the most difficult problems head on, first – if you have a problem which can ruin the entire project, you should always address it immediately, because if you cannot solve that problem, then solving all the other problems is meaningless.
The reason it is called fail faster is simple – the sooner you address these issues, the sooner you find problems, the sooner you can solve them. This means that if your project IS a failure, you find out right away, rather than after spending large amounts of time and effort on it.
Thus, failing faster is about two things – finding issues as quickly as possible, and addressing project-ending issues right off the bat so that if they prove insolvable, you don’t waste additional resources on the project.
In other words, fail faster is actually about succeeding faster, because you spend less time failing and more time succeeding because if something doesn’t work, you find out more quickly and suss out the problem.
Fail faster is not about failure being good – failure isn’t good. What fail faster is about is making failure less bad.
Anyone who tells you that failing is a good thing is wrong. It isn’t. Success is always preferable to failure. But a cheap failure is preferable to an expensive one. And very often, on a failed project, the real choice is not between success and failure, but cheap failure and expensive failure.
This is why “fail faster” is a good mantra to have. It is not about failure being good. It isn’t about that at all – if your entire project goes smoothly, it meant that you got things right the first time. This is a good thing!
No, fail faster is about the fact that not every project is a good one, and it is better to find out that your project is going to fail early on rather than later on. If there is some insurmountable problem – your propeller needs to be made out of unobtainium, your OC is inherently unlikeable – then it is better to find that out right off the bat and start on a different project or build around the problem.
People who always succeed at big things are not suffering for it. This is simply wrong. And indeed, most of the people who always succeed at big things do so because they successfully find the right things TO focus on – if every book you write is a bestseller, and your goal is to sell as many books as possible, then you have found the right things to focus on. It isn’t that they are cursed by their success – it is that they are good at figuring out what to work on.
When you look at fanfiction and similar things, however, “popularity” is almost entirely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Getting 2000 followers on FIMFiction isn’t necessarily all that meaningful, and doesn’t necessarily transfer over to real life. Indeed, absolutely anyone with decent grammatical skills can probably get 2000 followers on FIMFiction – simply write a clopfic every single week, and in a year or so, you’ll hit 2k followers.
So what does matter? Improving yourself. Trying to get better at writing. Trying out new things. Fanfiction is a safe place to fail because the stakes are low – if you write a story trying to be very purple and it sucks, then no one really cares and it doesn’t affect the rest of your life in any way. All you invested was a bit of your time – though if you write a terrible 200,000 word novel, then maybe you lost more than that.
If you never try new things, then you aren’t improving yourself. The important part is self-improvement – learning and growing. Success comes in being able to put your new skills to work; failure comes in not doing so.
Now, mind you, you might not be here to improve yourself. That’s fine. But if you aren’t trying to improve yourself, you won’t be better everywhere else. Stasis is death in life.
But it isn’t about failure or success; it is about growing as a person.
Fail faster merely is a means of trying to figure out what the best ideas are. Try stuff quickly to see if it works, don’t spent two months doing an ornate plan on something you can try to figure out in a day via direct action.
This is why writing short stories can be helpful as a writer; you are focusing down on the stuff you really need to work out, and if your story sucks, then you can abandon it without having invested too much time into it. A failed 3,000 word story is vastly preferable to a failed 80,000 word novel, because you spent far less time on the 3k word story – in fact, you probably spent far less than 3/80ths as much time, because writing longer stuff tends to take not only more time linearly, but actually above-linearly.
Success is good. If you succeed when you do things for the first time, that isn’t a bad thing in any way. But if it is something you plan on relying on as a skill, you’re going to want to do it several times to make sure your success wasn’t more luck than skill.
But the truth is, some people really do succeed at things the first time they try them. They look at a problem and just solve it right off the bat. This really happens. The idea that this is bad is deeply flawed and comes from sour grapes. It is a good thing. And usually, it comes from them being good at seeing problems before they even rear their head.
They aren’t worse for their success. And they actually have higher plateaus than everyone else, not lower ones – they start out on a higher level. They may or may not have less room to grow because they’re already closer to the top, but they have higher peaks because they have higher base levels of ability, and thus have more to build on top of.
Desire for self-improvement makes you a better person. And this is why you’ll find, completely unsurprisingly, the better people are, the more they desire to improve themselves. The reason for this is very simple – because this is the mindset that drives people to make themselves better, it is far more often found in people who succeed than in people who fail, because people who succeed are made more likely to succeed by this very mentality.
So contrary to what you claim, when you see people who succeed all the time at important things, things which are dependent upon skill and talent, they tend to be very much about self-improvement. The less dependent on skill you are, the less likely it is you will care about self-improvement. The people who tend to do new things but only fail rarely are the best, not the worst.
But there are people here with 2000 followers who suck!
Well, yeah. Like I said, success here doesn’t mean a whole lot, and if you count “success” as “getting lots of followers”, followers are accumulated over time – writing stuff which hits the feature box gets you followers, but if you write a clop story every single week, you’ll get 2000 followers eventually – probably in a year or two. Is that really success, though, or is it just Progress Quest, filling up a meter?
If I wanted nothing more than to accumulate a large number of followers, I would just write clop. I don’t. I want to write good stories and improve my craft as a writer, and I want to have fun with the stories I write, and writing clop mostly isn’t that fun to me. So I don’t write it; I write other things. If I come up with something that seems really fun to write, that happens to be clop, I’ll write it, but the only reason I would write something else would be if I was doing an experiment or a bet – wanted to prove that I was correct about something or whatever.
That’s not to say that you can’t learn something from some of these people, and persistence counts for a lot, but having a ton of followers usually either means you wrote something super successful, or you’ve written a great deal. And indeed, learning about how they market themselves can help – I’ve learned about how many eyes you can get on something just with a single post on Reddit. That’s crazy! And that’s useful information. So is knowing how group dynamics work, self-promotion, ect.
This is all the fault of schools!
Uh, no. This is actually the fault of basic human psychology. People don’t like failing. And we don’t like failing for a very good reason – failure is bad. We’re wired to not like failing, and to avoid failures. And this is a good thing! We’re wired this way for a reason. Just like lots of stuff we aren’t supposed to eat tastes terrible to us, failure makes people feel bad because it is bad.
Thing is, though, not trying at all is its own type of failure – invisible, but no less pervasive. And a lot of people just don’t try. In fact, the primary cause of failure in real life is simply never bothering in the first place – a sort of invisible miasma of failure which permeates the Earth.
To be fair, we do have a very powerful counteracting urge for novelty – people simultaneously are wary of new things and very happy with new things, and it is only in the unhealthy when this gets taken to an extreme (neophobia and those idiots who always line up for the newest iPhone).
But the idea that failure is a good thing is simply wrong. Failure is bad. You should try to succeed, always. You simply need to be aware that trying out new things is tough and you won’t be good at things right off the bat most of the time.
2303181 thanks for enumerating yet another reason I'm happy to mostly stick to oneshots. If one bombs, it's 3-5 hours gone, not 3-5 days.
2303775
Fixed~
I mean, I never called him a liar in the first place. What are you talking about.
2303181
First of all, I actually like this response because it does something that aids in the discussion: anylze. Yes, failure is often viewed as a bad thing, but I personally believe this is harmful. Failing shouldn't be something that is punished, but rather rewarded. Yes, it can be bad for something that's far grander or more pressing, but to fail, one has to actually do something in the first place, no?
That's what I'm getting at. The more we are determined to punish failure, the more we are discouraging people to even get up and do things. Why bother even attempting something when you have a feeling you will fail?
Another point is that I believe failure is good because for most of my life, I have learned far more from failing than actually succeeding. I know I'm not the only one's who has had this happen in their lives. That is why I want to form the group, so I can share that experience with others in a safe enviroment.
You actually came far closer to the description of it than I did, with the minor mistake of saying that failure isn't good. Failure at the stage the error-finding takes place is always good. And that, again, is the point—that failure shouldn't be seen as a bad thing in the first place. The sooner we can all be rid of this mentality, the sooner we can all move ahead the faster.
2303775
Truth be told, I didn't really see Dragon's response as him calling me a liar.
And for the record, I don't really mind if people do call me that
2303181
I don't think he means failure is inherently good. Rather, he's saying that we, every last one of us, are eventually going to fail, and when that happens we shouldn't treat it like the end of our lives. We should learn from it, so as not to repeat it, and make the best of that bad situation, so as to salvage what resources/money/etc we can from it. What's more, we shouldn't be paralyzed into inaction because we fear failure.
Also, I think what he was meaning about the schools wasn't that they introduce us to the notion that failure is bad, but simply that they reenforce the idea that we should fear failure above all else. I think I agree with him on this. Schools should teach children how to deal with failure, face the consequences of it, and then move on with their lives.
Dealing with failure is a skill acquired through experience. It is better to learn how to bounce back when we are as young as possible, instead of experiencing it for the first time when we're older, when it can cripple us in a multitude of ways. I think that's what he meant with his interpretation of the business cliche': to fail on this site, and keep failing until you have the coping mechanisms to bounce back from it.
2304151
As I noted, this is an incorrect view of failure. Failure is bad, inherently. To fail is to not succeed. To fail is to lose whatever resources you spent trying to succeed.
And no, you don't have to actually do something in the first place to fail; as I noted, the invisible kind of failure is actually one of the most common types of failure. Dropping out of high school, not working on something, not trying to better yourself, not trying to grow as a person, not trying to learn how to do something new... these are all extremely common forms of failure. They are not as visible in some ways, but are even more grossly visible in others, if you know how to look. Looking at income, for instance, you can see that people who drop out of high school are very likely to be failures at life - more likely to commit crimes, be poor, have bad jobs, ect.
A failure to execute when you need to execute is no less a failure than anything else.
Same reason we do all these things - self-motivation. There's actually a term for this - conscientiousness. It is the #2 predictor of success, after intelligence.
And failure is inherently punished, because you failed - you did not succeed at what you were trying to do. Your lack of success is an inherent punishment to all failure.
Thing is, most of the time, when you fail, it is because you aren't very good at something; the thing is, though, failure still isn't good. You are most likely to fail when you have the most room to improve at something; you thus associate learning with failure, but the two don't actually have anything to do with each other - people fail all the time and don't learn anything, and likewise, people often also learn by success as well. For instance, I learned a great deal about project design and development in FIRST Robotics my first year, and we successfully built a very good robot. Indeed, a great deal of learning is associated with success - if you don't succeed after learning about something, then you have by definition failed to learn it. That isn't a good thing, because it means you have to spend more time learning how to do it properly; the faster you pick up on things, the better off you are, as the faster you improve and the faster you can learn how to do other things as well.
If the first time you wrote a story, you wrote something which was decent, that would be a good thing; not making mistakes means that you already know the basics. The person who starts out on a higher level actually ends up almost invariably better than the person who starts out failing, because the person who starts out succeeding likely has a higher level of innate talent and learned whatever skills are necessary for success faster; this correlates with future success.
Think about a pair of runners; one guy starts out running the 100 meter in 11 seconds, the other in 13 seconds. All other things being equal, the guy who ran it in 11 seconds is quite likely to always be the faster of the two because of what made him start out running faster than the other guy. If I get in a race with Usain Bolt and lose, that doesn't make me more likely to beat him in the future; my ability to beat Usain Bolt is a combination of skill and physiology, but most people are never going to beat Usain Bolt in a sprint because they simply are not built to do so.
Note the "all other things being equal" is important; if one person is 7 years old and the other one is 18 years old, then the guy who is 7 years old is likely in that case actually to end up the faster of the two, regardless of which time was theirs.
2304632
Of course we shouldn't treat failure like the end of our lives. But that doesn't make failing a good thing.
Failure is to not succeed. Indeed, failure is, by definition, "the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective".
The correct state is not fear - fear is the mind-killer, as they say - but caution and wariness. You don't want to fail to achieve your objectives. Failure in school is something you want to avoid, and school should encourage you - strongly - to avoid failing in school. Being a failure in school is a mark of being a failure in life, and there is a very strong correlation between the two. While instilling a crippling fear of failure in people is unhealthy, they should have a healthy desire to succeed.
And when you note that failure is to not meet a desirable or intended objective, then it lays bare why failure is bad - because you failed to achieve something good.
Schools do try to instill self-esteem into their students, but noting that you will be judged is important, and the actual act of judgment is, in fact, very important - outcomes improve when you separate out students by ability level, putting the fastest learners together makes it so that the fastest learners learn faster and have better life outcomes, and having the slowest learners put together means that they can proceed at a slower pace and thus not get lost and, thus, fail and fail again, but actually succeed - albeit at a much slower rate.
If this was the case, then we would expect to see people who fail early in life to succeed more later in life. Instead, we see the opposite; failure early in life correlates quite strongly with failure later in life as well. Why is this?
That's because coping with failure is actually not about experience with coping with failure at all, but is related to the same skill set which drives you to success in the first place - self-esteem, innate talent, conscientiousness, honesty with oneself, ect. The ultimate antidote to failure is to overcome whatever the failure was and turn it into a success. When you're young, the things you fail at are things which can be succeeded at, and which you have not succeeded at yet. Thus, failure at these things - final failure, the failure to learn - is a very real failure, and it means that you suck because they are things which can be done - you just have personally failed to do so. This is the worst kind of failure, incidentally - if you fail where others have succeeded, and you cannot forge a path to success, then it is a real failure because it is something which is possible, but which you yourself cannot do.
When you fail at some novel thing, something which no one has succeeded at before, you always have to figure out the cause of failure. As they say, "Quitters never win, winners never quit, but if you can't win and you won't quit, you're an idiot." Some people will just keep beating their head into a wall repeatedly trying to do something which cannot be done (or which cannot be done in the way that they are trying to do it). But if other people have succeeded at it, and you don't, then you have to question what it is that you are doing wrong. If no one has ever succeeded at it, you still have to question that, but you also have to be aware that the cause may well be some extrinsic factor.
And teaching that skill has little to do with personally experiencing failure but learning about how to differentiate between the two. Indeed, most skills can be taught that way, and, as they say, it is better to learn from the failures of others than to learn from your own - and much cheaper to boot.
2305093 All right. I had to go away and give this some thought before commenting, because I think your premise here is not only invalid, but dangerously toxic and misinformed.
No, it isn't. Failure is a necessary precursor to success.
Failure is to not meet some goal or objective. That goal could be anything, however large or small. For your proposed absolute value to hold true, it must be true in all circumstances. So, to keep things in perspective I'll use writing-based analogies:
I have invested thousands of hours into my first work, Shades of Grey, and even after significant practice and learning, it is still neither as well written or popular as I would like it to be. I had hopes and goals – however crazy they may have been at the time – and I failed to reach them by a huge margin and at equally huge expense. Honestly? Best thing I ever did. Well, aside from spending the last seven years on self-awareness work to recover from depression, I suppose, but technically that's still a work in progress.
My last main story, Every Mare Needs Her Stallion, on the other hand, is my most successful story by just about any objective benchmark. No external editing, made EqD instantly (pretty much jumped the que by having it green-lit by a pre-reader before even being sure I was going to submit it), and with a few tweaks, will soon make TRG. Did I get much out of the experience? Yep! Sure did. Was it more than I gained or benefitted from SoG? Nope. Not even close.
Of course, that raises the spectre of how we really define failure. I can just as easily see Shades of Grey as a success because I learned, and grew, so much in the process of writing it. So which is it? Neither. It isn't objectively one or the other, and there is where you 'failure is bad' becomes toxic in the way that mirrors the very reason why people such as Selbi and Garnot might even have need for a group such as this one.
It's dogma. It has little – more likely nothing – to do with reality and encapsulates nothing more than one person's perception how how reality (or possibly the perception of it) should be. Well, surprise! You don't get to make that call. When you try, though, you try to contort people into boxes that don't make sense and people get warped as a result: down becomes up, red becomes blue, and frustration becomes shame. That or you run into some jackass like me who will call you on it.
Because here's the reality:
Everything you know can be categorised into things you have been told and never challenged, or things that have been demonstrated to be true because of some kind of failure. Every subconscious choice you make is built upon millions of success/fail moments that lead up to it. This is how the brain functions. You try something, you see what happens as a result, and you process it to become a more complete, more advanced, and more competent human being on the other side of it.
If I want to know how X happens, and I know that, when I do Y, X happens, I can make a link that Y causes X.
I propose the hypothesis that Y causes X.
Someone else demonstrates doing Y in a way that doesn't cause X, and thus my hypothesis has failed. However, knowing that Y can, but does not necessarily, precede X, furthers my long term goal of finding out how X happens. I was on the wrong track and the failure was a necessary part of furthering my agenda.
This is the very core of how humans innately learn things. We are scientists to the core, right up and till emotions twist our reasoning as a form of self-defence.
Failure is a part of epistemology. To reject failure as a healthy, worthy system of growth and knowledge is to embrace dogma and delusion and faith, as we see this in writers who are convinced they are great because they have thousands of followers and who make the same, basic errors on every story. At a minimum, their growth is stunted. To brandish failure as a stick to beat the drums of self-improvement is the very reason why self-esteem ever becomes an issue. It is the rejection of reality itself and the imposition of illusion. It is abuse – devoid of any and all compassion and empathy for the human condition.
Indeed, the only way that 'failure is inherently bad' is when you force a limited frame of success/failure onto a situation. People are quite capable of choosing their own frames of reference without society shoving one down their throats.
Failure is neither good not bad. Failure is just a label a very narrow perception of reality. What we do with that reality, is everything, and that is why warping reality with dogma is toxic to the human mind.
Hmm, and what is one of the best ways to achieve conscientiousness? Oh yes, that would be not filling children's heads up with the fear of failure in the first place. Being unafraid to get something wrong and learn from it is a key factor in highly self-motivated and effective individuals. Stressing kids out with the fear of failure reduces IQ, lifespan, increases risk of cancer, heart disease, depression... Again, I refer you to the very reasons this thread has come about and the people whom such a group would best serve – people contaminated by the same kind of abusive dogma you're wielding here.
Nope.
You really have a thing for inappropriately absolute statements. You are arguing against someone who is saying that his life experience is that his failures have been positive and essentially saying 'no it hasn't' while sticking your fingers in your ears. Present a cohesive rebuttal or GTFO.
And here we really have the crux of the issue. You're taking your personal assumptions about what constitutes good and bad 'things' and measuring other people by them, apparently oblivious that your perspective is neither absolute nor inherently 'true'.
It is perfectly valid to say that, having tried to learn something and failed, you have gained information that can lead to a more successful future. The growth may not be in your immediate career progression, but if you can't see the economic growth in failing then the problem is more likely that you have a giant blind spot.
I'm straining to imagine how this is even relevant to... anything. Ever. Failure to beat Usain Bolt at a sprint is only relevant if your sole goal is to beat Usain Bolt in a sprint. If that's the case, the problem is probably that you're crazy. And that's how this argument is constructed: anything that isn't getting to the maximum possible output in the minimum possible time is objectively bad!
It seems to me that you're coming at this from completely the wrong angle. You realise that we're not talking about failing being a preference, right? On a simplistic level, you can attempt an activity and either succeed or fail. Succeeding can be assumed to be good because you have a reason for setting a goal to start with (and succeeding can be subjectively 'bad' depending on the reasoning for that goal), and failing can be good because there must be a reason for failing about which things can be learned.
If, however, you fail and insist that you would have been better off succeeding, you have taken a long walk off the diving board of reality and ended up in cloud cuckoo land – say hello to Princess Unikitty for me. It's irrelevant. It's fantasy. Success of failure is based on reality, and reacting to it in reality means assessing what happened and what you can learn from it, which is completely separate from succeeding or failing.
'Failing faster' is just a way of minimising your losses and maximising your feedback. It is built around the premise that we can't know in advance whether something will succeed for fail. If such an endeavour fails, you can examine possible reasons why in the knowledge that there was nothing you could have done to change that outcome because you didn't know. If you had known, you'd have done it and it wouldn't have been a failure. Saying that such a failure is good is not the same as saying it is preferable. You can't say 'it would have been better if it had succeeded' is diving into fantasy again and ignoring the reality that success simply wasn't possible.
So when we're talking about 'failing faster', it is simply a way of gather data about reality as quickly and efficiently as possible, not trying to fail in the incorrect assumption that it will produce long term benefits. You have to be trying to succeed to get useful results, and if you were trying and failed that success was simply never on the cards and now you get to know why.
Telling someone that they should have succeeded is a form of abuse, because it is bending reality to accommodate your delusions. 'Failure is bad' is just such a delusion.
-M
2306424
This is simply false.
The first robot I ever built worked quite well, as did the second; the second, in fact, won the competition it was entered in. The same applies to many other things; aceing tests, picking up new material quickly, ect. Succeeding right off the bat is awesome. And you can totally do it, sometimes.
There are some things which you won't be good at for a while. If you go into drawing and expect to instantly be a great artist with no prior training whatsoever, then yes, you are most likely going to fail and fall flat on your face, with varying consequences depending on your personal investment. Learning to be an artist is an investment because you have to spend a lot of time improving your craft to the point where you won't fail and start succeeding. The cost of becoming an artist is that you have to spend a great deal of time failing before you will succeed - all that time and effort and money is a cost. The benefit is, eventually, hopefully, actually being a competent artist. But if you had just already been a competent artist, then you wouldn't have needed to spend that effort on becoming one, and thus been able to spend that time getting even better still, or producing valuable works, or doing other things.
Whether or not you can salvage your losses, a failure is still a failure, and if you had succeeded where you had failed, you would have more. And I think you're missing this (very important) point.
Had you succeeded, why would that have been? Well, most likely it would have been because you were already good at it. Obviously, being good at something already is better than having to learn how to do it from scratch. The higher you are to start out with, the better off you are.
Now, this is not to say that learning is a bad thing; that's not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying is that, if you were already awesome at it, you would have made something better. You would have practiced your (already better) skills, improving them further, putting you above where you were when you finished the project as it was.
So, was it a failure? Of course it was a failure. You spent thousands of hours (which is a ton of time) on something that didn't end up being very good. You learned some stuff, sure, but would you have learned more had you failed faster? Would you have learned more by writing a bunch of short stories in those thousand hours? A thousand hours is enough time to write 50-100 short stories. Would you be a better writer now had you spent more time iterating, and less time focusing on a failed project?
Remember, the point of fail faster is not to fail more, but to spend more time succeeding. Had you not gone in with unrealistic expectations, maybe you would have spent more time honing your craft and less time kicking at something which wasn't worth the time you were sinking into it.
When you look at it from the point of view of time spent succeeding, do you think it was the most effective use of your time?
This is why "fail faster" is actually a bad name for the process; people love it because it is a stupid buzzword. The actual idea behind fail faster is rapid iteration, for the purpose of mitigating failure and spending more time succeeding. It isn't because failure is good; it is because failure is bad, and the idea behind "fail faster" is to spend less time and energy doing bad things (failing) and more time doing good things (succeeding).
When you view things through the lens of "failure is bad", you end up seeing how things really work a lot more clearly. Having more is better than having less. Being better is better than being worse.
If one person has to spend a thousand hours to become competent, and another a hundred, then the person who spent only a hundred hours in the process of becoming competent is 900 hours of time richer.
This is what you seem not to be understanding.
This is the entire point of fail faster. This is the entire point of rapid iteration. And indeed, your mentality - that failure is good - is exactly why people don't like the term "fail faster," because it confuses people like you - you don't get it. And that's dangerous, because you think failure is good. It isn't.
The point is not to fail; the point is to succeed. The faster you iterate, the faster you get better, the faster you become successful, and the less you had to spend to get there.
Fear of failure, as I noted, is unhealthy. Trying to avoid failure, however, is a good thing. You just have to understand what failure is. Dropping out of school is equivalent to failing all of your future classes; you didn't avoid failure there, you just made it certain.
And this is what you're missing - the big picture. You are looking at things far too narrowly.
The most stressed out, lowest-IQ people who suffer the most health problems are... the poor. So fear of failure, if it prevents someone from being poor, is not the worst thing that can happen to someone.
It is generally healthier to be driven positively - "I want to succeed and be awesome" - rather than negatively - "God if I fail my life is over." But if the latter is what makes you actually spend the right amount of time studying for it, you're better off than the failure who didn't.
I already did. You just didn't listen.
Look at what I said in my previous post:
I then went into the purpose of fail faster:
2305093
Hang on. Time out, and press pause. I think I see where you're coming from here.
Now, mind you, the following is just speculation, but hear me out, if you would. I think you work for a corporate entity (or have been trained by a taskmaster who represents a corporate entity) who sees things only in black and white. This corporation will try its damnedest to convince its workers that if they are not producing something for the company at all times then they're wasting the company's time/money, and corporations hate for anyone to waste their money. It looks bad on the year end report to the shareholders. So they come up with brainwashing philosophies like the one you're demonstrating here. That isn't the problem here. Corporations exist to make money, and there is no harm in that on its own.
However, what it seems you've done is to internalize that philosophy into a personal motto and world view. You've reduced everything down to a 'bottom line', where something is either a benefit or a detriment, with no room in between. I hope that eventually, you'll understand that real life isn't often so black and white. Business may be able to get away with charts and statistics to dictate a person's actions, but when you're dealing with life away from the boardroom, sometimes you're going to need to fail, and there will be no way around it.
Either that or you're just being a troll. Everyone reading your responses knows that's a possibility, even if you won't admit it. But lets not operate under that assumption.
2302119
And this is exactly why I said to be careful with making a group like this. You've not even made it yet, and you already have a possible troll right here in the blog post.
2307480
I have worked for a large company (HP), a small company (Energ2), and my own company.
It has nothing to do with any of that, though.
It has to do with reality.
Have you ever studied economics?
Ultimately this is all an outgrowth of what is known as Return on Investment (RoI).
Whenever you do something - anything - you are paying costs. Time, money, resources, whatever. These have two consequences - first off, you've expended resources, and secondly, you are suffering from what are known as "opportunity costs" - basically, you could have done other things, but instead chose to do this thing.
When you work, you are exchanging your time for money and experience. The time you gave them is lost, the money and experience you got is a gain.
When you learn something, you are exchanging your time (and possibly your money) for experience, skill, and talent.
Ultimately, your goal in everything - absolutely everything - is to maximize your ROI.
Now, you may say, "Money isn't everything!" But the catch is, this is actually kind of wrong - it isn't that money is the most important thing (indeed, money is in and of itself worthless - well, unless you're like me and sleep on a pile of gold coins) but that money is a means of measuring value, and value is what is truly, well, valuable. Going over and spending a day on the beach costs money and opportunity costs, but provides value in the form of personal satisfaction. However, if you would derive the same amount of personal satisfaction just lying around in your backyard, then going to the beach is a waste - you spent money going out to the beach but didn't derive any additional satisfaction from doing so, so you got a worse ROI than you would have otherwise.
Thing is, you never really know outcomes ahead of time; you're always more or less making an estimate or projection. This means you won't necessarily make optimal decisions all the time from an objective perspective, but you try to do the best you can given the information that you have.
When you fail at things, you're getting poor ROI. Ultimately, though, you aren't going to be an amazing artist or an incredible runner without spending time practicing them - and that practice is a cost. Competing in races, you may be "playing to win", but ultimately your true goal, if you have no chance of victory, is to work your way up and improve and learn what it is like inside a race. Drawing, you'll produce poor works of art, but if you are struggling and learning to get better at things, rather than just blindly drawing things badly over and over again (this is known as "gainful practice", incidentally), you'll improve a lot faster. Because your terrible drawings have no real value in and of themselves, the main benefit you get is getting better - and as such, given that you're spending time learning how to get better, your drawings which have no value but increase your talent by a larger margin than your drawings which have no value but increase your talent by a lesser margin are simply better failures because you spent just as much effort on them but gained more from them.
It doesn't really matter if you call them failures or successes - your real goal here is to get better. And if you are failing to optimize that process, you're wasting your time and resources.
As I noted, not all failures are created equal. Some of them give you some benefit; others don't. Some cost less, others more.
That's where "fail faster" comes from - the idea behind fail faster is that you minimize your costs and maximizing your benefits. You address problems sooner, faster, figure out what works and what doesn't with minimal waste, and thus come to succeed at a much faster and higher rate.
Successful people and businesses adopt this strategy, but it isn't because failure is good. In fact, it is for the exact opposite reason - it is because failure is bad that rapid iteration is successful. You spend less time failing and more time succeeding; you come to succeed faster, and with a lower expenditure of resources.
The person who doesn't adopt rapid iteration is more likely to spend large amounts of time beating their head against a wall for little or no gain, while someone who does is more likely to see problems and work around them, address them properly, or spend their time more appropriately and effectively.
I'm not a troll.
I'm merely explaining the truth behind failure.
If you look for "fail faster", what you'll find is a bunch of results like "Fail Faster. Succeed Sooner." And that tells you the real truth of it - the goal is not to fail, but to succeed. Failure is bad. Fail faster is all about failing less, because the faster you get through your problems, the sooner you stop failing.
2307344
And instantly you demonstrate why your position simply isn't valid. You've taken one tiny time-slice from one tiny point of view and presented it as universal. That is either disingenuous or ignorant.
Are you saying that never once did you fail to understand any concept instantly on the first pass? You never so much as mis-pronounced a word or stumbled over reading even once when you were leaning the language through which you learned how to build robots? Did you never fall over when learning to walk so that you could grow up and attend school, college, etc.?
No, failure is a necessary step of learning. If you built a robot successfully on the first attempt, it is because you had all the necessary failures out of the way already. If you can't understand this most basic premise of how human beings learn anything, then it casts a shadow over everything else you have said.
I suppose I should say thank you for clearly restating why your position is so utterly delusional and divorced from reality that it is toxic. Yes, if I consider irrelevant fantasies, I could have been ruler of the world if I was someone that I'm not. But I'm not that person. Neither was I the person that could have written that story well right of the bat.
Which only demonstrates again that you base your reasoning of such an incredibly narrow perspective that you are oblivious to all the other things there are to gain.
For starters, no, it wasn't explicitly a failure. This is a fact. Failing is not an objective standard.
Second, the entire process of editing and learning by-chapter is the implementation of failing faster. Mistakes made at the beginning were ironed out as chapters progressed. Everything I learned (and it was one hell of a lot) was through repetitive failures.
Third, not only can I not know that I would have learned more from writing so many short stories – and I don't think I would have – but it was not possible for me to have done so. It all very well saying that things could be different if you waved your magic want to summon an alternate reality, but your argument fails as soon as you pick up that wand.
Fourth, no, I do not think I would be a better writer because if I hadn't done things the way I did, I doubt I would be a writer at all. Again, you seem utterly oblivious to the underlying principle that being a better writer is only one possible short-term goal amongst many, on top of some much longer-term ones.
That goal is an assumption that you don't get to make. That may hold true in a business setting, but we're talking about real people in their day to day lives. We're not discussing the merits of failing faster, we're discussing the validity of 'failing is bad'. You can learn from succeeding, you can learn from failing – exactly how much is down to the variables. Short-term success, in and of itself, is a superficial goal and rarely the end one.
Considering how distorted your view is, I am forced to dismiss that assertion. 'Having more is better than having less' is a deepity: it sounds nice until you spend enough time thinking about it (or very little time, since I've had my failures already) to realise that it's utterly meaningless. More and less of what? On average, people who win the lottery in a big way (UK only – it's what I have knowledge of) are less happy after the inevitable splurge than before it. By 'having more' they often realise that they actually have less of everything that is important. Perspective is key.
The Ego wants without end. Achieve a goal and it wants more. The biggest endorphin rush from wanting comes just the moment before you get the object of your desire. I many ways, having more can ruin your experience of having it at all. We're funny creatures like that. The end goal isn't everything; the journey is every bit as important – something you appear highly resistant to. No goal is worth not 'living' along the way.
Any yet your 'failure is bad' position is the very source of the fear of failure. It's another contradiction in your position.
At the same time, there is really no such thing, and it demonstrates you lack of understanding regards how people function. If you're not trying to succeed at the stated goal, then you're trying to succeed at some other goal by failing the first. We're always trying to succeed – it is impossible to be otherwise and thus the point is invalid.
Given that you seem so unaware of how the mind works, I'd say you have a lot of work yet to do on that front. But this will be a good failure for you.
Or, it is succeeding at remaining sane. Perhaps it means not getting bullied, abused, or held back. Hell, maybe it means simply surviving: 10 children committed suicide in just seven weeks in 2014 in NYC. There have been other spikes.
Maybe they drop out because they just don't care, in which case there is still a significant chance to work out where those children were failed so that they can become happier and more productive that the could possible have even been had they finished school.
But hell, maybe, just maybe, they drop out because they realise that everyone around this is sprouting the kind of indoctrinated bullshit that you are giving off here. Mainly, that you can't pre-judge what is failure and success for other people. By doing so, you display your disconnection from reality and kids are far more susceptible to that.
Nope, I'm the only here that is looking at the bigger picture.
Again, this is where I'm saying that you are the one with the narrowed view. You're completely ignoring why anyone would get to the 'if I fail my life is over' stage. The very position you are taking, it's sheer toxicity and fantasy, is the kind of thinking that puts people in the false black-and-white, pass/fail dichotomy in the first place. Your position lacks internal consistency.
No. At no point did you address the fact that he said his failures have been a positive force in his life. His failures were not 'bad'. Still, your point of view is too narrow to see what the blog post is even about. And you still haven't actually made any kind of case for why failure is bad, you're only expressed it as an opinion – one that is easily contradicted by reality.
2307480
Now, now, I wouldn't call Dragon's comments troll-ish. A bit misguided, yes, but they are still valid. As such, they deserve to be heard. He isn't actively harming the discussion. In fact, he is presenting his own view. So long as that's the case, Dragon can't be considered a troll.
2309008
Uh, that's exactly what you're doing. That's the problem.
Failure isn't a necessary precursor to success.
Do you know what the word necessary means? Necessary means required. It means that any success must be preceded by failure. If it is, indeed, possible to succeed at times without failing, then by definition, failure is not necessary.
So any one instance of success without preceding failure disproves your idea.
As it turns out, this isn't even all that uncommon; I have succeeded at many, many things without failing at them first. And you probably have as well.
I'm not saying I've never failed once in my entire life, nor was I claiming otherwise. But that wasn't my point, now was it? That is just a strawman.
The point is that failure is bad. It is not necessary. You can succeed on things the first time. Indeed, some things you are quite likely to succeed at the first time; others you are much less likely to succeed at right off the bat.
Storks don't deliver babies.
Likewise, failure is not necessary for success. If you succeeded right off the bat at something, you'd be better off. The fact that this does not always happen does not mean that failure is necessary; it means that you aren't good enough to succeed at it the first time around.
This is simply to redefine things in a completely meaningless and worthless way, commonly known as moving the goalposts.
The point is not that people never fail, and I never stated otherwise. I simply stated that failure is not necessary for success, because it isn't.
If the first time I try to build a robot, I succeed at the task, that means that I did not fail at it. That means I was well-equipped to tackle the problem to begin with and rather than flailing around and sucking, I did all that was necessary to prepare myself, got all the help which was required, and then executed correctly on it on my first go. I didn't do it alone, and I didn't do it blindly.
And that is very frequently how people do succeed the first time out. Sure, sometimes I'll just read something and learn it the first time (lots of random facts have gotten stuck in my head this way) but when you're doing something complicated, frequently it requires preparation and teamwork and many other things to get things right the first time.
But you can get it right the first time.
The fact that many people don't doesn't mean that failure is necessary; it means that they're not good enough to succeed at it right off the bat. There's a difference between the two, and a very important one at that.
You're focusing on the wrong thing, which is my entire point. You're saying that failure is good, but that's just plain old wrong.
The fact that people often fail does not make failure a good thing, just as the fact that people often kill each other does not make murder a good thing. The frequency of an event does not make it a good thing.
Why was it impossible for you to write a bunch of short stories?
Why could you not have made a different choice?
That's uh... not an assumption. That's literally the point of fail faster. That's why fail faster is a good thing. And it isn't just about a business setting (though given that most people spend 40+ hours a week in a business setting, the idea that it isn't "real people in their day to day lives" is pretty silly to begin with). It extends everywhere, to all corners of life. Much like the scientific method, and indeed related to it, rapid iteration is all about getting better as fast as possible. It is an optimization.
The point of fail faster is to succeed sooner. It is to spend less time failing and more time being successful. It is about improving outcomes.
As far as "short-term success" goes... well, that depends on what you're doing, now doesn't it? There's many forms of short-term success which are very important. Likewise, oftentimes a short-term success (drawing something successfully) is an indicator of long-term success (you can actually draw now).
It was a conclusion which arose from the evidence.
There is a term for this:
Rationalization.
You're making excuses. You're lying to yourself to justify yourself.
You are saying that because you failed, failure must be a good thing.
This isn't logical at all. And it isn't true.
Why do people who win the lottery often spend all their money?
Well, the reason is very simple: because they didn't earn it. You see, many people who fail to accumulate wealth do so because they don't have habits which are condusive to accumulating wealth. When you're handed a gigantic pile of money out of nowhere, but didn't ever build up the skills necessary to get that giant pile of money in the first place, you are likely to fritter it away; you don't understand how to manage your wealth, and as such you end up spending it all and are left with nothing because that's how you always spent all your ordinary income.
They think "Oh, I have a lot of money, now all my problems are over!" But unless your problems are all caused by lack of money - and most people's problems are not - then getting a gigantic pile of money might make you think that your problems are over, and then come to realize that they aren't over at all because the problems you had weren't caused by money. And because you have a lot more time and options, you now have the ability to make many bad decisions you never even contemplated previously.
On the other hand, if you hand someone like Warren Buffet $450 million dollars, he won't suffer for it at all. Indeed, I suspect that if you handed most people who were merely somewhat rich - say, had $10 million - an extra few hundred million, they'd be much less likely to fritter it away and lose it all, simply because they already had the wealth management skills necessary to keep their cash.
As Robert Pagliarini (a sudden wealth advisor) notes, frequently, when someone ordinary wins the lottery, it basically becomes "Christmas every day" for a month - you can buy large amounts of stuff and it is crazy. But, as he also notes, Christmas is special because it only comes once per year; once you get used to being able to buy whatever you want, it loses its specialness.
Christmas isn't even special to me anymore now, which probably means that if I won the lottery, I'd be more likely to keep my wealth simply because I wouldn't feel compelled to buy useless stuff. I might buy a few things - most likely, a house with an indoor pool and an electric vehicle - but... well, that would probably be about it really. I mean, I have most of the stuff that I actually need to enjoy myself, and I have no temptation to go out and eat at all the five star restaurants in the world. I have little compulsion to travel. And of course, I already have a decent sum of money in my bank account, and indeed made over $1100 this week from stock alone (thanks Halliburton). I'm not wealthy, but the average American is in debt; I'm well in the green.
Winning the lottery is a good thing, but you can easily make very bad decisions as a result of it. But this isn't because winning the lottery is bad, but because wealth is a kind of power, and the more power you have, the larger the consequences are of the decisions you make. There's a reason people speak of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory; it is a very real phenomeneon. But it isn't because victory is bad or that it is an inevitable process.
If I succeed at something, then it means I've succeeded at it, and can do more things, explore more, leverage my success to even greater heights, produce awesome things - all the neat stuff. Every success makes me that much more awesome.
The idea that I'm not "living" along the way is just plain old silly.
Only among the weak. I don't fear failure, but I do endeavour to succeed.
People who are not honest with themselves about things often are failing without even recognizing they're doing so. If you distort failure into success, and claim that it isn't a bad thing, you can wallow in failure a long time.
Unless you quit school in order to do something bigger and better - say, run your own (successful) start-up company - it is a failure. You didn't cope.
Incidentally, there's about 38,364 suicides per year in the US (using the 2010 number). 24% of the population is under the age of 18, and NYC has about 23.5 million residents, making up about 7.5% of the US population. Thus I would expect roughly 686 people under the age of 18 to commit suicide in NYC per year; that means, in other words, I would expect roughly 2 people of that age to off themselves every DAY there; ten in seven weeks isn't even a spike. Even if you're talking about just New York City itself (population 8.4 million), you'd still expect about two suicides of young people there every three days.
Well, the common point in all your failures is you. The idea that the system always failed them is pointing the finger; frequently, people who drop out of school do so because of who they themselves are. It is true that we are to some extent products of our environment, but we always have a choice.
It isn't "indoctrinated bullshit"; first off, it isn't indoctrination (few people understand this sort of thing, so obviously the idea that it would be indoctrinated is quite silly), and secondly, it is absolutely correct.
How does it lack internal consistency?
All you've done is yell at me. But you haven't pointed out where I'm wrong, not even once. You erect and knock down strawmen, without addressing my actual arguments.
When you use terms like "toxic" and "indoctrination" to describe the point of view of someone who is arguing with you, that is actually a very strong sign that you yourself are not behaving rationally. If you believe that someone merely stating their point of view is "bad for people," then it is a sign that you yourself are a fanatic - you yourself are scared that your point of view might be wrong, and therefore, anyone who disagrees with you must be drowned out, must be a product of indoctrination, because the idea that your opponents might be rational, thinking people implies to you that you yourself are not.
This is a very clear sign of black and white, bimodal thinking that you claim to decry.
People disagreeing with you is not a sign of indoctrination, nor is anyone's opinion "toxic". You may not like it, but ideas are not poison; if you cannot contemplate an idea without getting sick, then it means that you are not really capable of being objective about it. If you can't deal with the idea that people who disagree with you can be behaving rationally, then you are going to get very angry at the world and never really understand it.
The reality is that sometimes the world is pass or fail; sometimes, you really do either succeed or fail at a task. In fact, that is not infrequently the case; you either get into a good school, or you don't. You either get the job, or you don't. You either get your manuscript published, or you don't. Other times, it is more shades of gray - improving a skill, frequently there is no point point at which suddenly you become massively better at it, though sometimes that is not the case.
Is English not your first language? These words have meaning.
Failure: Lack of success.
Success: Favorable or desirable outcome.
Thus a failure is a lack of a favorable or desirable outcome. Saying that failure is a desirable outcome is like saying black is white or war is peace.
This is why people don't like the term "fail faster": because it misleads people like you and the OP into thinking that failure is a good thing, somehow. It isn't.
Failure is bad. Success is good. Rapid iteration is about trying to overcome challenges and improve as quickly as possible by addressing vital concerns as soon as possible and continuous improvement; you are trying to spend as little time as possible not succeeding. That's why people often append "succeed faster" to it, because that is the ultimate point of it.
As I noted, not all failures are created equal. Sometimes, a failure is a complete waste; other times, there is something you can salvage from it. If I have a thousand chemical candidates, and am searching for something which has some specific function, you might be forgiven for thinking that every failure brings me closer to success, but that's not, in fact, the case, as another possibility is that none of the chemical candidates will even do what I want them to do. On the other hand, when writing a story, every draft might be better than the previous one; however, if your story is bad at its very core, then no matter how much you polish it, it still is going to be a bad story, and you may be wasting your time on it.
Things aren't always modal, either; the first draft of a story might be alright, but further revisions might make it increasingly awesome.
2310016
I'm taking all experience into account across a broad a continuum as possible (your entire life). You're disregarding everything outside of the sole window of a single project.
Who is limiting their point of view?
If there is some important step that you don't know, and you don't know that you don't know it, then failing is a necessary step towards succeeding. At the very least it's a useful one – probably more advantageous that double-checking everything you have ever learned before you start.
Now you're avoiding the actual question and just substituting you limited view to support you case again. It is possible to succeed a a single, isolated task without failing, but many failures will have occurred to give you the skills to succeed in that task. This is why your view is limited and mine is not.
Aside from misrepresenting my position, I'd like to point out that this is exactly why you're also wrong. If there is a single time when failure isn't bad, then failing is not inherently bad. I for one have had lots of failures that kinda good, actually. Not preferable, but good, in the long run. Thus your point is invalid.
By strawman, I'm assuming that you mean 'point that completely invalidates mine and therefore can't be true'.
Your claim – the very one that I am here to dispute – is that failure is necessarily bad. I am saying that failure is a necessary step towards learning anything. The fact that some failures were necessary to learn to walk, talk, think, and a million other things, invalidates your claim.
No, this was by beef from the start. If the goalposts moved, you moved them.
If you ignore all the inconvenient details and focus on only the part that suits you. That's called moving the goal posts. You may have heard of it (but apparently you didn't understand it).
Nope. I'm saying that failure isn't explicitly bad. Now put the goalposts back you naughty boy.
Because I had neither the inclination nor the drive to do so. I wrote because I had a specific drive for one idea that I wanted to get down. I had no other ideas for stories at the time. Abandoning the project that I wanted to do would be very unlikely to boost my enthusiasm.
But I'm not talking about fail faster. I'm talking about your claim that failure is 'inherently bad'.
Wait a minute... come on now. Put the goalposts back.
Well, seeing that evidence would be nice, because it doesn't follow from what you've said so far.
Of course it isn't true, that's just a rationalisation that you made up.
Sheesh.
I'm not saying that failure is a good thing. I'm pretty sure I haven't sad that. In fact, let me quote myself:
Wahay! Will you look at that: I explicitly stated that I wasn't saying that failure was good. It's like you've moved the goalposts or something... or that you're blatantly misrepresting my position to argue yours. You should really stop wheeling out these logical fallacies, because I know what they mean, too.
This is a strawman.
Stop it.
And arrogant, apparently.
And a complete cunt, it seems.
A really massive cunt.
And no, it's not an ad homenim. I'm not saying that your point is in any wrong because I think you're a cunt. I just think you're a cunt. It's an insult, but an honest and heartfelt one.
Sometimes, staying in school and becoming a good little worker drone is the biggest failure you can ever achieve. I'm guessing that's you.
So if I cut all your limbs off and then you fail to become a racing car driver, that failure is entirely yours? You know that the brain physically develops differently based on environment, don't you? I'm guessing not. Yes, the analogy does count.
Few people understand what, exactly? No-one needs to understand why failure is or isn't bad to condition children into believing that it is. It only requires that you believe it – even if that's just having been indoctrinated into it.
It can also be a sigh of working from a logical principle that has an absolute truth value.
And yet again you have to lie about what I have said to make a point. But lets set aside that I haven't said that it is a desirable outcome – just not a bad one – and focus on how you've taken one specific meaning of success and how you're implementing it.
Having a failure be a positive force in a persons life does not make it a 'desirable outcome', and I'm going to assume that 'favourable' in this instance means a net gain, otherwise everything where anyone learned anything ever would be successful.
Further, it seems to me that you're clinging to the less-common meaning of the word (the more common being 'the correct or desired result of an attempt' – Mirriam Webster) that doesn't quite function in the particular application that you want it to. I mean, if you want to say that a rescue attempt was 'successful' after zero persons were rescued but some other, secondary bonus happened to come out of it... well, I don't think many people are going to buy that.
Either way, though, my point still stands: some failures have positive results. Failures are not intrinsically bad. Hell, by your, rather stretched, definition, Shades of Grey was an unmitigated success, because the outcome was overwhelmingly positive if you set aside the simpler standard of the story's success. And yet you said:
You're not even sticking to your own definitions here. If the definition of success is going to be the 'correct or desired result of an attempt' then it is perfectly plausible for a failure to be more useful than a success. I'm not saying it's likely, but it is possible. Taken to the extreme, babies can only learn by failing – the have no chance at succeeding at anything (shy of things that are autonomic reactions, like sucking on teets or shitting) until they've 'played' with all their muscles sufficiently to have even a basic understanding of how they work. Are you saying that all of those failures are bad? That would just be plain silly.
You might want to avoid waving definitions around when doing so shows that you're contradicting yourself.
Let me clarify one more time:
It's not that failure is good; it's that failure isn't inherently bad.
It's not that one specific action must be failed before it can succeed, but that some number of failures are a pre-requisite to learning what it takes to succeed.
It's not about the success on one, specific story; it's about the process of human growth and the ability to write stories in general.
I don't give a rats ass about 'fail faster'; that's not what I'm talking about and it never was.