Fear of Failure
Of course, I’ve heard people say “don’t be afraid to fail” since I was a child, but I clearly didn’t take it to heart. Nowadays, I spend far more time thinking about what I could do, than actually doing things. Trying to find the best programming language, framework and project to finally pour some effort into. Half researching, half waiting for it to fall in my lap. This has led to to me not really having any depth in my programming knowledge, or a half decent project to my name.
Perfect is the enemy of good
I started seriously looking at improvement when I decided to pursue becoming a better League of Legends player. From league coaches, among other sources, I gained a better understanding of why the fear of failure is bad.
Learning happens when you push yourself, not from doing the same comfortable habits on repeat (definition of insanity, anyone?). Being afraid of pushing yourself or trying new things leads to avoiding learning opportunities and more stress when you do inevitably fail. A trendy example is SpaceX blowing up rocket after rocket until they iterated to the top of the rocket building business.
These problems are fundamentally intertwined. Building many rockets allows for successive approximation. Progress in any given technology is simply # of iterations * progress between iterations.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2020
I was afraid of making a mediocre project because I didn’t want people to look at my work and see novice mistakes. That would be failure. With this attitude, I haven’t been making those novice mistakes to then fix and learn from them. And so I’m still a novice.
This post is an open letter to remind myself and others that failure is normal consequence of improvement. The theme I’m running on this site isn’t exactly what I wanted. But it’s good and the site is actually running. Make a crappy to-do list app, blow up some rockets, learn from your mistakes and become better.
The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried