Personal Thought: On Failing
Personal Thought: On Failing
It sucks when you try things and they don’t work out. Just super frustrating when you do things and they don’t turn out to be what you expect or you can’t get it to work. I tried to build three different projects in my spare time this year and none have turned out the way that I thought they would. I just felt like the output was not good enough, so I decided to archive each project and move on to new projects. It’s always exciting to start something new; the beginning is so fun! And then you hit turbulence and roadblocks. You try, try, try and then realize the sunk-cost fallacy is way too overwhelming to continue. You abandon the project in the middle and it never really finishes or is in a state that makes it presentable.
- I tried to make a chess project that would enable me to analyze the moves of chess grand masters, with the hope that it would improve my chess game.
- I tried to make a data visualization of Napoleon’s military conquests and a simple viz of all his wins and losses + the location where each battle happened.
- I tried to make a Docker, Kubernetes and Airflow project where Airflow would be containerized and deployed via Kubernetes. This project I will continue, but start in a new way. This project I had the most success with.
Nothing seems to ever work the first time. It seems like everything worthwhile takes arduous hours of experimentation, pain, and stress. All the effort does not even guarantee success, so we stop half way or don’t even start in the beginning due to a fear of failing. Why do we all universally fear failure? It’s because it’s the unknown. Sometimes failure is totally unexpected and unpredictable. Other times, failure is when we put everything into something and it still doesn’t work out the way we want. That’s what shakes us to our core as people: when we face something unpredictable or put everything into something, we naturally expect and want things to work out. And when it doesn’t, we want the unexpected problem to go away or we naturally think that all the time and effort was “wasted”. We feel bad and think of the opportunity cost and what we could have been doing instead with our finite resources of time and energy. Then we start questioning ourselves: “we’re not good at [insert activity where the failure occurred]”. The negative stories we start telling ourselves for whatever reason seems to grow like a cascading avalanche if we don’t nip it in the bud. It’s extremely dangerous and something that must be kept in check from my experience. The negativity and detrimental self-talk will create a mental block if left unchecked and allowed to persist. It may permanently block you from learning or experiencing new things.
Yet if we don’t push ourselves out of our comfort zones, we remain stagnant and never grow. I used to think that you win or you lose, but I realized more recently it’s actually you win or you learn. I’ve realized after studying for many years that people at the top of their game (i.e. think top CEOs, entrepreneurs, athletes, and just overall special people) think this way. They all universally view failure as lessons to improve and to get better. They don’t view things in terms of big mountains, rather they view things in terms of small steps. They strongly believe that big things are accomplished through small steps, where consistency is most paramount. If a person stacks small wins on top of each other consistently over the course of years, the big win will naturally happen. When the individual compares where they are now to where they were before after years of work, it’s obvious the improvement and the gains in skill. The more things we try, the more we grow and the more we enhance our neural network pathways to take on newer, more exciting challenges. We should be excited to fail and experiment. This is a mental model that I’m incorporating into my thinking far more than before. It’s ok to crash and burn. Why not and what’s there to lose? It’s really nothing; fear is what keeps most people from reaching their full potential. It’s simple: remove the fear by just doing things, whether you feel like doing it or not. This is easier said than done, but it starts with the mind. When you configure your mindset to embrace failing, you become more open-minded and solutions-oriented. It’s time to strive forward with great zeal and gusto, and reframe each setback as an opportunity!