• @EatATaco@lemm.eeEnglish
    28•8 months ago

    I think this is looking at it backwards. I think we shouldn’t view failure as a bad thing. Failure is learning. It’s part of growing. You fail at something, you’ve learned something (well, hopefully). Often you learn more by failing than by succeeding.

    Like coaching my kid’s soccer team today: I want them to fail sometimes. I have a player doing well with his right foot and scores a couple of goals, I switch him to the other side and tell him to use his left foot “But I’m not good at it!” good. “I’m not good at goalie.” Excellent, here’s the goalie jersey and go get in there. That’s the point, I’m trying to make them better soccer players. If we just played into their strengths all the time, it would limit how much of a better player they can become.

    At work, as a programmer, I try something out. It doesn’t work out because there was some unforeseen condition that causes my initial pattern to fail? No big deal, just redo the pattern from scratch (if, of course, there is the time for that) or rethink the pattern. And I’ve seen how often that solves some other problem, or makes another thing more efficient, or makes future development more easy.

    So who cares if your coffee shop failed, or you’re a “failed writer” (I’ve never heard that before), if we don’t treat failure as a bad thing, then people will be more likely to accept that and learn from it.

    • @milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
      5•8 months ago

      I think you’re right about embracing failure, but I think this is different: is your kid’s soccer team a failure if they don’t play forever? Or is it a success that they play some games, maybe win once or twice, even just learn and have fun?

      Some things in life we seem to label failures if they stop after a season, as if long-term stability were the only true goal.

    • sp3ctr4l
      4•8 months ago

      This is a very important point to make.

      I made my own post about problems I have with what was posted, but an angle that I would love if more people adopted would be to stop viewing failure as inherently negative and useless in nearly all cases.

      Failure can teach you a lot if you are capable of reflection and analysis, and failure happens to everyone, all the time, and is totally normal.

    • @dave@feddit.ukEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      The thing with football is that there is a specific goal (pun very much intended). It’s ok to have a mindset that you’re going to play in a way that makes it unlikely (in the beginning) you’ll achieve that goal (eg play left footed), but if that player never improved, would you still think it’s ‘working’)?

      I worked in an industry for many years that was obsessed with goal-setting, and that mindset never appealed to me. I eventually found a book called Goal Free Living by Stephen M. Shapiro. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me, and the phrase “Carry a compass not a map” stayed with me until today. I’ve done several different things since then but I’ll never be famous for any of them as I still keep changing direction.