Failing fast to learn a lot

I’ve been thinking about blogging for some time now and today turned out to be the day i started doing that.

I was reading this post by Scott Hanselman which is what gave me the idea to the name of my blog.
Since this is going to be the first blog on my behalf I thought way not explain why I named it “Failing fast…” after all most people try not to fail at all.

A few years back I was inline skating a lot trying to make it to the national team only to end up seeing people i had raced (and for a big part of them beated) the entire season. I got angry real angry but I also decided that the year after I had to make it a lot harder not to bring me a long. So I hired a coach to help me with the mental aspects. That turned out to change how I look at tasks in general not just in sports.

On his business card it said “The will to succeed has to be grater than the fear of failing”. Easier said than done but just thinking about that did help and some where down the road I figured out that most of my successes were build on a heap of failures. Or more exactly they were build on what I learned from failing.

Back in the world of skating I had realized that I was holding my self back. I was affraid of what would happen if I was betting everything on one chance to win, I might spent all my energy and wind up last or I might actually win. By not trying I was however ensuring I wouldn’t win. Winning in sport involves gambling, you cannot win on national level with out gambling, no one is that good.

However the more experience you get in gambling the better you will get at it, you will eventually learn when to start your sprint for the finish line, when the try and break away and when just to sit back and let some one else do the work.

Sometimes what seems as the thing not to do might just be what you should be doing. One of my favorite interview replies came from Jacob Piil after winning a stage in The Tour de France. A journalist asked him why he made his break away with 6km (~4miles) to go in a strong head win (that’s usually a very bad idea). The reply was simple “My legs were hurting badly so I thought the others were hurting as well, so they would probably not follow”.

I’m sure somewhere in the back of his mind, a little voice was telling him that it was suicide but having tryed a lot and failed a lot. He knew he’s own body well enough, to know when to change the rules of engagement to succeed.

My point is, that there’s much more information in failing than in succeeding and trying to avoid to fail is as easy to do and as prosperous as trying not to eat. It will hurt and at some point be the end of you.

In the end we all want to succeed but it’s inevitable that we will make errors on the way to success. The faster we fail the sooner we can correct the errors. That realization made me change the way I conduct my work to make errors stand out as fast as possible instead of trying to hide them and as of today that realization has become the basis of the name of my blog.