Fail Gloriously

No, not faster.

Well, it can be faster if you want.

But mainly, gloriously.

You're going to make a gigantic mess and it's going to be beautiful.

You know why?

Because no matter what you do after this, no matter how inexperienced and clumsy you are, you'll never be this bad at it ever again.

So go make the greatest disaster the world has seen.

Alright, dramatics out of the way, here's the safety label.

This is only for low to zero stakes activities with massive skill ranges and minimal resource investment.

Do not fail gloriously to learn how to ride a bicycle. Cooking an omelet for the first time is fine as long as your glory extends only to the taste and structure of the omelet, not setting the kitchen on fire.

That's the reasoning for stakes.

Skill range is because this only works if it's massively outside your skill range, which requires a massive skill range to start unless you're a total beginner.

As for resources, you don't want to invest a ton of resources in something you know will go poorly. You need to be comfortable with the waste, however much it is. If you aren't, you'll try too hard and feel bad about failing.

This is a technique for getting out of a rut. That rut is usually feeling like a novice, though it can be other things. Fundamentally, it's scary to try something new.

It's scarier when it isn't new but you still feel like a novice.

Cooking, physical crafts, skill based games. For things with high skill ceilings where you discover more you can't do as you grow, you can feel like you're still learning the basics for a very long time.

Giving myself permission to do something so far outside my capacity I can't possibly succeed is how I keep my motivation up. I couldn't succeed, so failing is normal and I can't feel bad about it. Now I have a reference point so absurdly bad I can't possibly do worse.

You don't have to fail extra badly, but you can if you want. The point is to see how far below the requirement your skill baseline lies. All that faff about glory is just my particular way of turning off my instinct which says I'm not allowed to fail, let alone fail deliberately.

Sometimes you actually don't fail that gloriously. That's motivating in it's own way. You did a hard thing, and you did it well. Go celebrate that.

But for the times you do fail, revel in the failure anyway. Then, pick up the pieces and get back to the usual grind. It's only up from here.

- Rew

Nightly Notes

The question of when someone stops being a novice fascinates me.

I recently helped someone with fixing something they were fully capable of fixing themselves, but lacked the search skills to find the solution to.¹

I have no clue how to teach someone the general form of search skills, but I think it's the simplest differentiator between the forever novice and someone on their way to becoming an expert. The only way I can fathom imparting it to someone else is giving them a project well outside their scope of knowledge but just within the reach of their skillset, hoping they pick up the intuition for searching out information along the way.

Good search skills are undervalued.

- Rew