Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and constant searching for new solutions.
—Atul Gawande, Better
Learn how you fail is the second blog I’ll discuss from the Apprenticeship Pattern book. I’d like to begin this piece with a quote from Morihei Ueshiba: “Failure is a key to success, each failure teaches us something”. Everyone wants to be successful, but not everyone is willing to accept failure. However, I will add that my greatest life achievement thus far has been learning to accept my failures. This is, at the end of the day, motivation.
Failure, according to Atul Gawande, is unavoidable since it will happen to all of us at some point. I hold the same viewpoint. We won’t be able to learn if we never make mistakes. We are called losers when we fail at something, but victors when we learn from our mistakes. Failure serves as a reminder that we are all the same, and that success is earned through hard effort and determination
It has been the same for me. I accept that I make mistakes and that I have learned from them. I didn’t understand how programming worked well enough. But I learned by doing, and I’ve made a few blunders along the way. I knew that to be an effective programmer, I needed to mix knowledge, attitude, and technical capability with soft skills when I initially chose my future job would be. I needed to apply my talents, which are methods and processes that supply computers with instructions on which action to execute, to prepare myself to be a computer programmer. But the most important thing I prepared for was that I would fail a few times until I arrived at the conclusion that I will be a decent coder.
One other thing that I would like to talk about, is also the solution given to this pattern. It is a good choice that when we are becoming conscious of the things that trip us up, we allow ourselves the choice between working to fix these problems or cutting our losses. I totally agree and for sure that we have to accept that there will be also some things that we are not good at. Also when we encountered by failing this “thing”, it will be a lesson on how to prevent it in the future. Only in that way we won’t fail again. But the most important thing we need to know is that the only thing we learn from is a failure and not success.
From the blog CS@worcester – Xhulja's Blogs by xmurati and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.