If you're not failing you're not trying.
dshipper.posterous.com
dshipper.posterous.com
There are two basic approaches to route climbing with ropes: "Traditional Climbing" with removable gear placed as the rock allows and the potential for injury if you were to fall, and "Sport Climbing", with closely spaced fixed gear, where falling is a matter of course.
"Trad" climbers will often go years, decades, entire careers without ever falling off the rock. "Sport" climbers will average around a dozen good falls on a typical day out.
So there you have two observable groups, one where failure is not an option, the other where failure is commonplace. Given the difference in mindset, it's not surprising that you'll often see 14 year old kids with one year of experience in a world where falling is just part of the game out-climbing men with 20 years experience who've never truly exceeded their limits.
Falling onto a dynamic rope is not in any way traumatic, even to an old guy like myself. The equipment really is that good. A 10 foot lead fall into space is nowhere near as demanding on the body as, say, a lay-up in Basketball.
Oh, and, out of curiosity - how old are you, how long have you been climbing and what were your failures and worst injuries?
I'm asking because I am turning 30 and feel like my chance for a young and silly, careless life is slowly over.. no chance to even think about learning climbing or snowboarding or any other exciting sports.
On top of that I am an aspiring musician to I am kinda worried about my fingers and arms.
Rock climbing is a great way to get your head free (being a developer myself, I find myself thinking about project related topics all the time, and climbing and sex are the best ways for me to get my head free).
Re: crashing against the wall: that usually does not happen because you fall mostly downward and only a small bit towards the wall, which you can absorb with your feet.
Oh, and one nice thing about climbing is that the better you get at it the less it hurts to fall. So sure if you fell off a beginner route with lots of ledges to hit it would certainly hurt. Fortunately you don't do that too often. Once you get past the beginner stage, routes tend to get steeper and less featured. As in, less stuff to run into when you come off.
I spent the better part of October pitching off routes on the Greek island of Kalymnos and never hit anything but air. The routes there overhang up to 45 degrees, so there's simply not anything to hit, and therefore hardly any real consequence to a fall.
Those climbers who primarily boulder, that's climbing without a rope, fairly close to the ground, are better still. Because they work on insanely difficult problems and fall all the time.
Bouldering and falling all the time does not mean that you're failing cheaply. Falling hurts!
Granted, you can still break things. But it still works out safer on a per-hour basis than Volleyball.
You don't want an airliner-pilot to seek failure. If banks make a big mistake and we slide into recession, people loose jobs, should we pat them on the shoulder for trying? What about the judge that sends an innocent man to prison? What about the solider that accidentally shoots an unarmed man? Can we assume he has learned from his mistake and will now be a better soldier? While this might be the case, the answer must be: No, we shouldn't.
Instead of postulating a culture of "fail often", we should find a higher standard. One that is based on hard work, sober and educated decision making and quality.
Furthermore it can be argued that one can learn more from success than from failure. Failure can be a byproduct of trying, but by no means it should be inverted into a measurement of success.
Let's stop this trend towards failure-ism now. I have a feeling that it might have very negative consequences.
The post is to be seen in the light of big corporations and individuals who are too afraid to fail and always go for the safer option which is mostly the local minima.
To be able to reach the global maxima of one's potential when you are at the peak of a local maxima, you might need to slide down and then learn to climb the higher mountain.
Bit it's not about innovation either. It's about pedestrian activities which one is afraid to take because of fear of failure. It could be going to play football with friends after 20 years of not playing. It could be trying to ride the first bike a kid got in front of his neighbours. It could be starting your own business. It could be anything one would like to do but his fear of failure stops him.
It's not about taking stupid risks (the airline pilot). It's about calculated risks and eliminating public failure as something one consider critically harmful. If your failure could cost you $1000 and some public exposure and it's the reason you won't try, but you would try if it'd cost you $2000 without public exposure - well, that's what this post is about. To learn to put less "value" on public exposure of your failures so that you'd stop considering it being such a big cost of potential failure.
I agree it's not black and white, but I think failure is more stark and thus sticks with us, helping us to grow.
He learned to fly in a little single engine plane, and routinely recovered it from stalls and even spins. His instructor would have him close his eyes, then throw the plane out of balance and have him attempt to correct it by feel (and he'd often fail to do so). He's crashed that very jet you're riding in dozens or even hundreds of times in the simulator. He's even recovered a real one from a stall during his certification.
The only reason he's good enough to be trusted to fly with you in the back is because he's been training to failure all those years.
When things went wrong, he didn't lose his cool or panic. He was ready for things to go wrong even if he wasn't expecting it.
By failing all of the time during training, he conditioned himself to not be upset about failure.
I think that we improve continuously from failure into something that looks more and more like success. Success is very relative to what you are able to accomplish at a time. If failing teach you something, might be it's a success ?
It's not that I see failure as particularly bad, or horrible. It's that it's not the point. The point is to WIN. When you launch a startup, and fail, try again. But wouldn't it have been better to succeed? Isn't the point to make money, or build a platform, or win the game? Not every product has a market. Not every customer call will result in a sale. But the point is to make a winner.
Why would you purposely seek out failure?
Of course, the undercurrent here is that in order to succeed - in order to win big - you must risk a lot, and risk failure. Risking failure is necessary. Making mistakes happens. If you're not risking failure or humiliation, you're not playing the best game you can.
Risking failure is not the same as actually failing.
Maybe that's just semantics, but it is a very important difference. If you're purposely seeking failure, I feel sorry for you.
This post wasn't really about seeking out failure as it was about recognizing that we have limitations and taking that as a challenge to overcome them. It was also about further realizing that failure at something isn't necessarily an indictment of your ability to succeed but a sign that you are pushing yourself sufficiently that if you keep learning from your mistakes you WILL succeed eventually.
Set your target, go hard towards it, if you fail or come off the rails, accept it, assess it, suck it up and keep going.
All I see this doing is encouraging people to be wreckless, and not in a constructive way. Go hard, but hard enough that it's of benefit to you and your project, have some regard for the outcome that you actually want.
I was lightly entertaining a passing thought about shutting down my startup.
I was thinking: "I love my startup. I put so much work and heart into it. But maybe I should shut it down."
You see, I had just finished reading a series of emails from customers telling me how unusable they thought it was. They really loved the idea, but just couldn't use it.
These were smart people, who got what we were trying to do, and yet were leaving.
And then it struck me: I was failing! That's why it's hard to breathe.
The feeling was so intolerable, and so unfamiliar (I rarely set myself in a high-probability-of-failure situation), that I didn't even know what it was.
All I knew is "This feeling must stop. At any cost"
I agree that failing isn't something to be aspired to. But I don't think that's what the OP is saying.
If I'm stretching myself, I should be feeling this more and more. And getting more comfortable with it as just part of the picture of a successful life.
After growing up watching MJ play, it speaks volumes.
* Catastrophic failures: You fail so bad that you have no option but to trash everything and start again
* Detectable / Manageable failures: You fail, but this failure is not central to your existence, so you simply try again
While there are some cases where you have no option but to risk catastrophic failures, manageable failures are something people completely miss.
Fitness / Weight training has all sorts of examples of this, the goal is to identify the limits of your abilities and to push this limit, without risking permanent damage.
Consider this: Blogger (Pyra Collab tools), Flickr (GNE), Twitter (Odeo), Nokia Phones (losses for first 15 yrs), Google (initial focus was Enterprise Search until Adwords / Adsense acquisition) were all pushing the limits, and failing, but not so spectacularly that they didn't have resources left to pivot.
Identifying the difference, and the ability to contain possibly-catastrophic errors into manageable pieces is the true art of the startup.
also reminds me of the zuckerberg quote: "unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough." failure isn't the goal, rather a byproduct of good work.
http://londonleisureandpleasure.blogspot.com/2011/02/you-hav...
A friend of mine sent it to me a while back but I remembered it recently whilst watching the uprising in Egypt. It now hangs on the wall in my bathroom. I'm sure I've been failing unwittingly and wittingly with my new start-up:
In spite of any failure "I know the only thing I'm addicted to right now is winning" - read this inspirational and somewhat related post by Jason Baptiste from OnStartups for a great take on this now infamous Charlie Sheen quote, entrepreneurship and failure: http://bit.ly/efGLFi
Think-Screw-Iterate-Screw-Iterate-Succeed (very similar to Feynman algorithm)
Think-Screw-Iterate-Screw-Iterate-Screw-Succeed-Screw
If you're getting it that often, why stop?