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Intelligent Fast Failure

There is a video made by honda that I want to share with you:

Failure: The Secret to Success

It's from 2009 already but I really love this video and have watched it lots of times now. I always watch it when something goes wrong. I like it because it shows that everyone makes mistakes once in a while and that mistakes are inevitable on the way to success, no matter what you do.

In the Coursera course "Creativity, Innovation and Change" by the Pennsylvania State University the lecture that made the biggest impression on me was Jack Matson's short talk on the importance of failure. In it he says that only by trying many different things and failing many times can we find the best solution. He described that he let his students try to build the tallest structure with popsicle sticks and made two big observations about what strategies were leading to success.

First he observed that many students stood back and watched what others were doing and then went on to build their own structures improving on the ideas/designs they had just seen.
And second he found that those who tried totally new approaches and experimented with them instead of just improving what they had started with were the ones who built the tallest structures.

So maybe we really need to learn to embrace failure a lot more and don't let it knock us down. Maybe we need to treat almost all failures simply as syntax errors. If you can program you know that very few programs will run as you intended and without any error messages right from the start. But instead of seeing yourself as a failure for this and taking it personally you look at what the computer is telling you and try to fix the error(s) or even rewrite all or part of your code if the solution you tried turned out not to be workable. You search the internet for solutions others have already tried and found for your problem and you try many different things. Intelligent Fast Failure at work. I guess it is time to give it a try in other areas of life as well.
Try many different things and persist until it works!