How to Live When You Could Be Dead by Deborah James

Author:Deborah James [James, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781728281971
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2021-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Popular in business, fast failures, which I like to think of as ‘give-it-a-go’ failures, are where you’re keen to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can. You might also think of them as deliberate or iterative failures, as you expect that things will go wrong, but you decide to have a go anyway so that you can learn and improve. These are often low-level failures that we can learn from quickly, adapting and reapplying ourselves, before cracking on with the next attempt. They’re unaware of it at the time, but toddlers learning to walk or feed themselves make these types of failures – they give things a go, and when they don’t work out, they instantly try something different. These types of failures also occur when experimentation is required. Sometimes you just need to leap into the unknown and see what happens.

Between the ages of eight and fourteen, I was in the national gymnastics programme, and this kind of give-it-a-go failure was absolutely baked into the process. When attempting a new move, I couldn’t simply do it first time; there was no expectation of success at the outset. Instead, I had to fail and get back up and rectify the problem or error. My coach had to teach me how, and I would also learn from others in the gym. It required a lot of support and building up to being able to perform the move. On the parallel bars, for example, I would start by falling into the cushioned pit beneath the apparatus without any expectation of catching the bar. I would then build up to having a teammate or coach underneath to catch me. Then, eventually, I might get to the point where I felt I could do it without so much padding beneath the bars and my coach standing by to help if need be. And I would have to repeat the move over and over again, learning from each failed attempt until I was confident with it and able to move on to the next thing.

Working through those attempts was so important. If you tried a new move without beginning at stage one, there was a very real possibility that you would break your neck. The reality is that you would never do that. I think sometimes we forget this and go straight in for the kill. Then, when we do fail, we do so catastrophically, because we haven’t learned how to support ourselves along the way. Fast failures, on the other hand, acknowledge that you can’t just skip to the end, and that sometimes you need to give things a go and see what happens. In this way, they allow for incremental improvement towards ultimate success.

‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’

Samuel Beckett

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