Comment by scrrr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrrr | Hacker News Reader

I find the notion of failing as something that should be aspired to worrisome. Often the cost of failure is too high.

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.

But that airline pilot has been failing on a regular basis for years.

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.

I wonder how many times Chesley Sullenberger had to break a simulated plane in half before he could land a real one in the Hudson River.

Not the point. Even if he never trained for that specific instance before, he was ready for failure.

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 was agreeing by offering a real example of frequent failure leading to success.

Actually he failed, we could say that he crashed the plane into the Hudson River. It's a matter of measure. If he ever do it again, he might do even better ;).

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 safer to think of success as a step in a potentially endless process. Microsoft (as an example) treated IE6 as an end, and it cost them substantial market share while they tried to catch up to the new entrant.

Thanks for your comment scrrr, and while I see where you're coming from I don't agree. You brought up airline pilots and how they shouldn't seek failure. Obviously you don't want them to seek failure while they are in the sky. But in fact they seek failure ALL THE TIME while being trained. They simulate systems malfunctions and bad weather conditions and they mess up. In the simulator. But when they face those obstacles in the air they are invariably better prepared than had they never challenged themselves in the first place in the name of success.

They seek simulated failure of the equipment to test themselves. They do not set out intending to fail in their reactions to the simulated failure. But, if they do, it's a simulator and they can start over with new lessons learned.

It is not about professional activities. I do not expect airline pilot to try new tricks fully loaded with passengers, but I appreciate Wrights brothers efforts to try to put the man in the air in the first place. If they were afraid to try, if hundreds of others who tried it before them and failed were afraid to try, we could be still dreaming about flying.

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.

We do not expect an airline flyer to be learning how to do somersaults in air whit passengers.

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.

Whoa I love the local maxima metaphor that's awesome. And I agree, failure is all about personal growth and overcoming fear.

You need to manage your risk. Without a risk management strategy, failure is likely to be worse. Obviously a pilot won't blindly seek failure to improve (I'll head for that mountain to see how well this baby handles crash landing). '...accidently...' - A lot can learnt (and mitigated against) from accidents.

I agree it's not black and white, but I think failure is more stark and thus sticks with us, helping us to grow.

A good engineering team will design with various simultaneous failure modes in mind. I've never ever seen this mindset on the business side.

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