Photo: woodleywonderworks
It’s important to have a good relationship with failing.
Since failing is not an objective, external fact, but rather an interpretation we make, it turns out there is an art to failing. And like any art, doing it well takes practice.
Let’s say you’ve got a great idea. It’s a really great idea, and you fully expect it to be your personal jackpot.
Your idea is this: you’re going to reveal to the world your comprehensive list of songs that plants like.
You’ve discovered that your Meyer lemon tree likes a particular Puccini aria, but only on weekdays. On weekends, the lemon prefers certain jazz standards, like “Stormy Weather.”
You can get your tulips to do yoga by whistling Sousa marches to them.
And so on.
Now imagine spending years compiling your trade secret knowledge into an encyclopedia of plant song.
You hire web designers and marketing folks. At last, after five years of development and tweaking, the big day arrives, and you launch your product. Unfortunately, no one wants it. One person buys it, but he uses it as a doorstop.
The objective event of no one buying your product is not, in itself, a terrible thing. What is bad is the feeling of disappointment you have. After putting in so much effort, this experience of failure is bound to be hard to shake off. You might even feel like taking it out on your plants.
Now compare that scenario to this one. Same idea, different approach to realizing it:
Instead of spending years (and lots of money) putting a plant song book together, you make a list of “The Top Seven Songs Adored by Jade Plants” (informed by your copious research, of course), and within a few days, you put it online for anyone to see. You don’t charge a cent for it, but you do have a friend who knows a little bit about web design put up a form so visitors can post their comments. Then you tell all your friends about your new site.
Imagine all the things that could happen.
If your friends visit the site, but none of them even comment (or if they only leave comments such as “just stop. please.”) then you have learned something.
If one of the commenters asks whether you need to have formal voice training to sing to your plants, and the next comment is “Yeah, I was wondering that, too. Will I hurt my voice if I sing to my plants too loud?” then you have learned something else. It might be time to find a voice teacher you can partner up with.
In fancy engineering contexts, it’s called rapid prototyping.
I like calling it “fail as quickly as possible.” Get something out there, learn from what works and what doesn’t, try the next thing. Note that this “proactive failing” really only makes sense if you are doing something. The various ways of not acting, such as procrastinating, don’t provide the same benefits.
Try writing a comment to this post, even if you’ve never commented on a blog before. Share your insights about failing in productive ways. I look forward to reading them!