Learning from Failure

Scientists should embrace failing better. Failing better means looking beyond the obvious, further than what you know and what you know how to do. Failing better happens when we allow ourselves to ask questions, doubt results, and allow uncertainty.

The way of science is not to stop failing once you've succeeded. Success has to be tested rigorously and considered for what it has not revealed. It has to be used to get to the next place of our ignorance.

Many scientists say that science is about a pragmatic approach to putting pieces into a puzzle, and the more pieces you add, the more successful you are.

But this approach is driving science into a corner. We can't keep up with the exponentially expanding literature of ever narrower details. This approach is turning scientists more and more into a secret society of oddballs, tolerated because once in a while, some gadget or cure drops emerge out of the otherwise impenetrable machinery. This process is doomed to run out of steam, or bore us all to death.

There are two problems you can encounter when you're trying to learn something.

1. You have a clear understanding of what you'd like to do and how you're going to do it, but you're unable to implement the approach you've chosen. Slow things down so you can pay more attention to every aspect of the problem.
2. Speed learning is effective when you're not sure what the ideal should be and need more information to work it out. A good example of speed leading to move closer to quality is in entrepreneurial fields. Many fail because they picked the wrong problem to solve and wasted too much time trying to solve it.

The balance between going faster and doing it right depends on what you're trying to achieve.

• Faster feedback means more information to find out your key challenges and possible solutions.
• Slower helps you focus on a strategy you've chosen, allowing you to execute it correctly.

• Failure Strengthens You. Failure can tear you down but it also builds you to be a stronger person.
• Failure Gives You a Sense of Direction. You get a sense of clarity on everywhere you have gone wrong and how to take a better path to reach where you want to be.
• Failure Teaches You to Value all the right things in order to succeed.
• Failure Gets Rid Of Fear. Once you are accustomed to failing you have nothing left to fear anymore.
• Failure is an Opportunity. It shows us everywhere we might have gone wrong and gives us the opportunity to correct it.
• Failure is an Experience and could give us a deeper understanding of life and alter the way we look at everything that happens around us.