Learn How You Fail
This Apprenticeship Pattern covers learning how to fail, and more importantly how to recover from failing. It makes the point that failure is necessary to learn a new skill, and if you’re never failing then you’re likely not trying new things and not expanding your knowledge. Failure is a normal and natural part of learning something new, and it’s just as much a part of the process as anything else. If you want to learn a new skill, you can’t be afraid of failure, and you have to accept that it will happen at some point. By trying to avoid failure, you’re actively hindering your learning and limiting your potential skill.
The Apprenticeship Pattern also makes the point that learning how you fail helps with self-assessment. Through failure, you can learn more about yourself, such as what things you have more difficulty with, and what things you can pick up relatively easily. If you don’t try to push yourself to failure then you’ll never discover your limits, and you won’t know how efficiently and effectively you could be working. Failure also forces you to admit your weaknesses, and to learn not to waste time with things that are outside of your skillset, and instead spend your time doing things that you know you can do correctly.
The Apprenticeship Pattern also makes a point about not getting down on yourself about your failures. By changing your mindset from failure being a bad thing to failure being a valuable experience for learning, you will become more productive overall and more capable of learning new skills. If every time you experience failure you get down on yourself and become afraid of failure to avoid the experience, then you’ll become much less productive, much less capable of learning new skills, and much less experienced overall. The correct way to minimize failures and maximize potential is not to avoid it altogether, but instead to take it on your stride and learn from it so that the situation in which the failure would occur wouldn’t ever happen again, rather than avoiding the failure itself. Only in this way would you be able to become a proficient software craftsman, because that requires learning many new skills, and has the potential for many pitfalls and failings that you must learn from.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Alex's Blog by anelson42 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.