Experiments && Room For Failiure
— experiments — 4 min read
If everybody is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction. - Sam Walton
Technologies are limited, yet niches are in abundance, traditional approaches are restrictive in their own way, yet we keep seeing completely new set of approaches.
Which leaves me with the question:
How much room do we have for failure?
If you are new here or reading it first time,
Hi,
I am Aman and this safe space is my own metaverse, do check out all the adventures, hope you enjoy your ride :))
Failure: The age old evil
My goal here is not to stress on the necessity of failure for some positive outcome, rather what I intend to achieve here is to redefine failure, possibly as a framework for being more flexible in our approach.
For the better part of my life, I have associated failure with a negative notion, instead of a positive one, and by negative here, I mean restrictive in some ways.
It is somewhat a norm nowadays to fail, as people deem it to be the only way they can achieve an outcome, I think we have the rise of Internet culture to thank for this, It has become very much easier to project our failures, which in turn makes people more comfortable communicating their own failures.
All this is okay but this is not my central point of my discussion :((
The question, I find myself asking is:
How much room do we have for failure?
Well yes, we have our entire lives to fail at things, but it is not practical as we will uncover moving forward.
To be able to fail at things early in life is a privilege that only a few of us realize we have, as we grow older the room we have for failure shrinks, restricting us in many ways.
It all comes down to the risk you can take and the asymmetric games you can play in your finite time, I have written about the privileges of playing asymmetric games, do give it a read to understand my perspective better
Needs || Wants: The Privilege Of Playing Asymmetric Games
Whether or not you fail in an endeavor, it doesn't conveys much, it only acts a metric to assess the quality of your efforts, what really matters is the available space we have in our lives for such failed attempts.
To align you with my thought processes we will first have to look at the broader associations of failure only then we will be able to come at a concluding argument.
Failure and Progress: The Engine Of Society
A lot of the innovations that we see around us are a result of failed experiments, iterated upon many times, which is good when you have that available space but sadly failure is still looked down upon in many parts of the world, which leads to negative consequences
- Being penalized for attempting
- Failure in the endeavor itself
These two consequences negate failure as an option, removing optionality not only restricts us in our approach but also distorts relationship of failure and progress.
Without trying out new things or making an attempt to try out new things we have no possible chance of progress, If you look at it from a broader perspective, failure is a necessary evil for any sort of progress.
The available space we have for failure, influences progress in a multitude of ways, one possible way which I can think of now is vertical progress, surely there might be other ways but at this moment it's the only one that strikes my mind.
Failure and Optionality
Optionality is the state of enjoying possibilities without being on the hook to do anything. - Mihir A. Desai
Who doesn't like options, I love options.
Lack of options somewhat induces the notion of conformity for a particular thing, takes a toll on our free will for a second.
But what does failure has to do with optionality?
Many people visualize failure as an outcome of a certain set of decisions that didn't go to well, that's one way to look at it, but the way I see it,
Failure is more of a framework to create potential options, we can easily attribute the world around us to failed attempts.
It takes courage to fail at things, can also be disheartening at times if we are too much emotionally attached but keeping that aside for a bit, if actually try to interlink failure and optionality you will be awestruck by the role failure plays in creating options.
Having more room for failure helps us in creating more options, which eventually brings me back to my original question?
How much room do we have for failure?
While this is a tricky question to answer but nevertheless I am not afraid to be wrong in my own universe, let us make a leap to the final piece of the puzzle.
Experiments: Playing with Curiosity
What are your hobbies?
This is a common question we often hear in interviews and have tackled almost our entire lives growing up, little did I know at that time, what my curiosities were but now that I have some level of clarity, I can classify activities which I am personally interested in partaking.
It's hard to quantify my curiosity in words but still if you want to dive deeper into me, here you go:
Experiments designed to play around with our curiosities are one possible way of creating more optionality and progress, experiments allow us to fail fast at a smaller scale.
I guess there is no definitive answer for
How much room do we have for failure?
It depends a lot on the leverage we personally uphold.
One thing that I am sure of is the proportionality of age with the room we have for failure, starting out early in life allows us to carry out more experiments and fail more.
At the end it ultimately comes down to how much curios we can be to fail at things we enjoy.
Conclusion
This is where I currently align with in terms of failure and experiments, do let me know if you disagree with me, would love to have a conversation :))
Lastly, coming to experiments, here's one of my failed experiment ;)
