Dear Watercooler, Is failure the only way to learn in life?

[ajetrumpet]

Just a bit of fun on my part to blend my occupational interests with my appreciation for many of the speci...er, folks who contribute a great deal to this board.

Well, here is a big THANK YOU, on behalf of all the species present.

 

[Rabbie]

Just a bit of fun on my part to blend my occupational interests with my appreciation for many of the speci...er, folks who contribute a great deal to this board.

Thanks for including me!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Another motivational statement...

If at first you don't succeed, ... you're in good company.

When you fall flat on your face, the only REAL tragedy is if you liked your nose before the fall.

I had a teacher once who graded like a wild person with a long, sharp knife. My papers used to bleed they had so much red on them. When our class complained, she said, "Failure builds character. Easy exams don't prove anything. Don't you like a real challenge?" Only one of us had a good response: "You mean you like us so much you want to see us again next year?" Tests got easier after that.

But I digress... failure in the programming industry is a GOOD thing. As long as you are careful to fail BEFORE you take product to market. That's why on any systems I have managed in the past, I will NEVER EVER run version x.0 of anything. Except, of course, that for a long time, Microsoft never released minor versions of programs. Access was 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc. for a long time. Only lately have they started showing the detailed build number and lower-level version sequences.

Hey, everybody fails now and then. You want failure in a BIG way? I'll give you some REALLY big failures...

New Coke

Windows ME

The Edsel (automobile, for you young whippersnappers)

The movie Heaven's Gate

Fashion designer "Pop Top" Terp. (He made dresses out of ring-pull can tops. Looked like chain mail.)

And historically, ...

Phlogiston theory

Aether as a medium for light transmission

Ben Franklin's lesser-known contribution to the study of electrical phenomena. (No, not the kite experiment. Ben is ALSO the guy who established the convention that it is the POSITIVE charges that define the direction of current flow. Today we know it is the negative charges, but hey, he had a 50-50 shot at being right...)

The guy who invented the game of Russian Roulette - and practised it by himself.

Wrong-way Corrigan, the famous cross-country pilot. He flew across the country, one coast to the other, in a non-stop flight. First man to do so. Problem is, he wanted to cross the ocean, not the continent. Got his directions wrong by 180 degrees and never noticed that he wasn't over water. Sheesh!

William One-Shot Beaudine, the Hollywood director who NEVER shot a retake on a scene no matter how cheesy it was. But he was always on budget and on time. Never mind that the imperfections in the scenes showed up a bit more often... Like the time he had someone walking with a lit candle down a long hallway. Well, the "standard" way to show this using normally lit sets is to have a spotlight shining from off-camera to track the position of the candle. Never mind that when One-Shot shot it, the position of the spot and the candle rarely had anything to do with one another.

Then there was the director/producer who put together that cheese-fest from the late 50's, Robot Monster. Problem is, he didn't check schedules, and the only guy in Hollywood who had a working "robot suit" was booked solid throughout the entire shoot for this epic piece of fluff. So with a little creativity, he hired the guy who had the gorilla suit and had him wear a diving helmet with an antenna glued to it. Mistakes? No, sir, not a one.

So don't worry about failure. You're in good company! LOTS of people make mistakes in a very public way.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

A further thought on a different topic. Your question was, Is failure the only way to learn in life?

The REAL talent is the person who fails - but only just bad enough to dust self off and get going again.

The person who fails so badly as to be unable to make ANY more mistakes - because s/he died - now THAT's someone you don't want to emulate.

Look up "The Darwin Awards" if you want to see some REAL failures. To win a Darwin Award, you have to screw up so badly that you take yourself out of the gene pool. To my knowledge, only one man still lives who won a Darwin Award and survived it. But he took himself out of the gene pool by shooting off the source of his genes.

So when your programs crash around you, and things don't work as they should, just put it in perspective. You are still alive enough to cuss, bang your fist on the desk, wad up a sheet of paper and toss it in the trash, and leave the room mumbling.

Think of it this way. Here we are, seemingly intelligent people trying to communicate with an INANIMATE OBJECT! Repeatedly! What did you EXPECT to have happen? By the way, I'm right next to you, communicating away.

 

[Rich]

Well if failure is something we should learn from how did Americans vote for Bush, the writing was on the wall right from the start

 

[rainman89]

here we go again

 

[Rich]

here we go again

I thought it was a perfectly valid question to pose, the notion was that we learnt from our mistakes, unless I'm missing something very obvious that's not the case, and looks like it never will be. Is there something wrong with pointing the obvious flaw in the posted logic?

 

[RexesOperator]

favourite saying of mine also but with the addition

"He who makes the same mistake twice is a fool"

Hmmmmm depends on definition of "same" and "twice"

L

It also depends on the definition of fool:

"Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me."

 

[The_Doc_Man]

He who makes the same mistake only twice is still ahead of Rich - who consistently makes the same mistakes by tossing in anti-American comments thinking we wouldn't see them and would forgive him. I would turn the other cheek but I've heard that Rich is a cheeky bugger. And who wants to be buggered by Rich? (Don't everyone hold up all your hands at once, now...)

 

[Rich]

He who makes the same mistake only twice is still ahead of Rich - who consistently makes the same mistakes by tossing in anti-American comments thinking we wouldn't see them and would forgive him. I would turn the other cheek but I've heard that Rich is a cheeky bugger. And who wants to be buggered by Rich? (Don't everyone hold up all your hands at once, now...)

Here we go again, "anti American" as for buggering you'll have to take your turn in the queue, but then since it's not my forte, you're going to be somewhat disapointed I'm afraid.
Is "anti-Americanism" part of the American school curriculum

 

[MsLady]

A further thought on a different topic. Your question was, Is failure the only way to learn in life?

The REAL talent is the person who fails - but only just bad enough to dust self off and get going again.

The person who fails so badly as to be unable to make ANY more mistakes - because s/he died - now THAT's someone you don't want to emulate.

Look up "The Darwin Awards" if you want to see some REAL failures. To win a Darwin Award, you have to screw up so badly that you take yourself out of the gene pool. To my knowledge, only one man still lives who won a Darwin Award and survived it. But he took himself out of the gene pool by shooting off the source of his genes.

So when your programs crash around you, and things don't work as they should, just put it in perspective. You are still alive enough to cuss, bang your fist on the desk, wad up a sheet of paper and toss it in the trash, and leave the room mumbling.

Think of it this way. Here we are, seemingly intelligent people trying to communicate with an INANIMATE OBJECT! Repeatedly! What did you EXPECT to have happen? By the way, I'm right next to you, communicating away.

...so comforting. Thanks Doc_man... I am gaining alot from you and everyone in this thread.

 

[rsmonkey]

MsLady everything becomes oh so simple once you have watched Monty Pythons The Life Of Brian. take the song at the end "Always look on the bright side of life" as a literal incentive for your work... You make a mistake, you should think "bugger I wont do it that way again" or you do something right then think "great I'l remember that way" and write it down or summin. kinda like an educational journal.

I insist you watch that film aswell.. its like a wordly philisophical guide for me! hah

 

[EmmaJane]

I remember making my first amplifier without reading any documentation, blew up in 2 seconds. It was only the 4th version that stood out for more than one hour.

My dad always said that any documentation was only someone else's opinion on how something worked

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The UNIX mantra - RTFM - Read the Friggin' Manuals - is why OpenVMS guys don't always like UNIX. Manuals? We don't need no steenkin' manuals. If it is designed right, it is purely intuitive anyway. So I tend to agree with your dad, EmmaJane. Manuals are what you use when you are out of coffee and too blearly to reason it out.

And of course there are Windows manuals... but they are illegible on a good day. They were written by someone fluent in Sanskrit and translated to English by someone for whom both Sanskrit AND English were not primary or even second languages.

But of course, the ultimate in manuals was back in the heyday of the IBM 360 OS. A complete set of manuals filled (to overflowing) a six-foot high three-foot wide book case with five shelves (and the bottom and top). And you still had more to do. The damned JCL subset was one whole shelf! Just for the job control language. Sheesh, UNIX guys - tell the bimmers to RTFM. They'll hit you with one - and it'll be big enough to HURT.

 

[Banana]

Doc Man, I think you'll appreciate this gem:

 

[Ron_dK]

Doc Man, I think you'll appreciate this gem:

Same pic twice ?
Guess you just violated the 133 st normal form

And of course there are Windows manuals... but they are illegible on a good day. They were written by someone fluent in Sanskrit and translated to English by someone for whom both Sanskrit AND English were not primary or even second languages.

Apart from the help menu, I have never seen any windows manual
The last doc I tried to read/understand was Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 in Hungarian.
Still haven't finished it, but Debian is running quite nice on my PC as an alt to Windows, so who cares.

 

[Banana]

Same pic twice ?

I already showed that before?

Oh dear, I'm getting old...

Guess you just violated the 133 st normal form

If that mean I got to 132st normal form, then I'd think I'm in pretty good shape!