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by
Shane Snow
Read between
September 25 - September 28, 2023
Oscar Wilde once said, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
Experience
Silicon Valley crowd has decided that failure in the quest to build a business is not only OK, but cool. “Fail often” is a guiding aphorism.
“This is an innate issue for humans and one we have to overcome,” says Dr. Bradley Staats, who teaches business at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
with many things, the actual, long-term consequences of failure are negligible.
our survival instinct is to minimize the likelihood of bad things happening to us.
In business, the more socially acceptable it is to fail, the more likely smart people will try crazy things,
“If you’re not failing you are either very lucky, very good, or not pushing ...
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The more you win, the more likely you are to win again.
failing in business doesn’t make us better or smarter.
But succeeding makes us more likely to continue to succeed.
All great successes make mistakes along the way. NBA star Michael Jordan missed more than 9,000 shots and lost 300 games in his career. He was the best, and he failed a lot.
Success mistake
paradox of failure.”
this coping mechanism was itself responsible for the paradox. He and his colleagues called this attribution theory.
This is a survival mechanism. We externalize our mistakes because we need to live with ourselves afterward.
“People tend to attribute their own success to their effort and ability.
They can fail without failing.
The difference was how much the feedback caused a person to focus on himself rather than the task.
high-pressure feedback barrage tends to make us self-conscious. We get stuck inside our own heads.
The tough part about negative feedback is in separating ourselves from the perceived failure and turning our experiences into objective experiments.
to become scientists who see audience reaction as commentary on the joke, not the jokester. To turn off the part of their brains that says “I fail” when they get negative feedback.
The Second City transforms failure (something that implies finality) into simply feedback (something that can be used to improve).
“fail fast and fail often.”
accomplish three things to accelerate its performers’ growth: (1) it gives them rapid feedback; (2) it depersonalizes the feedback; and (3) it lowers the stakes and pressure, so students take risks that force them to improve.
Growth feedback
goal is to get students used to anticipating negative feedback and to get them out of their own heads.
This is about building confidence and creating a “safe” environment in which it’s OK to screw up.
Every laugh or lack thereof becomes a data point that the actors can use to better themselves.
By embracing all these tiny failures, there is no actual failure.*
“And just like a muscle, you have to fail a little bit in order to improve.” “We do that to them over and over and over again.”
Zach’s family tells the camera how knowing he would die has helped them realize what matters in life and to find true meaning.
“Just try and make people happy.”
LEVERAGE Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple. —DR. SEUSS
DHH lives and works by a philosophy that helps him do dramatically more with his time and effort.
Like a highway, computers are layers on layers of code that make them increasingly easy to use. Computer scientists call this abstraction.
With abstraction, scientists built layers of road which made computer travel faster. It made the act of using computers faster.
the art of selective slacking.
methodically searching for the least wasteful way to learn something or level up, which is what DHH did.
[Then] I can take the other 95 percent of the time and invest it in something I really care about.”
Platforms are tools and environments that let us do just that.
Dr. Tony Wagner, a Harvard researcher,
Finland ranked number one in the world in technology innovation,
“I THINK IT’S A great mistake to force children to learn mathematics,” said renowned physicist Freeman Dyson,
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Memorization of facts and figures is the primary culprit.
iPad app called Daisy the Dinosaur, where kids could begin to harness programming’s concepts
she created a programming language called Hopscotch for the iPad. It allows kids to generate their own games, apps, and animations using
MIT mathematician Seymour Papert calls constructionism, or learning by making and manipulating objects.
“You need to know what you don’t know, and how to figure it out,”
Hands-on learning and the use of tools, he says, helps us to want to learn, to get rapid feedback, and to actually grasp math better than memorizing facts from the bottom up.
need only higher-order thinking and the ability to use platforms to do everything else.
What’s important today is knowing how to use platforms to retrieve the information we need,
