Fail Fast, Fail Functionally, Fail Forward
Even Failing Can Have a Madness to Its Methods
An apple tree might be 500 apples, each with 10 seeds. That is a lot of seeds. But why would nature need so many seeds to grow just a few more trees? Nature is hinting a lesson. It may be telling us this — Most seeds never grow, but for something to happen, we need numbers to beat the odds. Indeed, we observed the same pattern.
1. 20 interviews to get 1 job.
2. 40 interviewees to find 1 good employee.
3. 50 clients to clinch a sale on 1 house, car, vacuum cleaner, insurance policy, idea.
4. 100 dates to find a good life partner
5. 100 acquaintances to find that 1 special friend.Understanding the odds of nature, we don’t get so disappointed. We become more aware that we are not unique, hapless victims. It is just the statistical nature of nature itself. The next step is to understand them, and engineer possibilities with the working principles. Don’t get angry. Frustration is understood. Get even with the odds.
Determined people fail more often. They plant more seeds. They also have more successful trials which may mount up to their final successful hit. Therein, to beat the odds, we need more trials. And to gain more within the time, velocity and accuracy is key.
To ensure velocity is not compromised with burnt-out, we have to learn to manage our moods which can affect our modus operandi. Tend to the mind before the situation. We have to manage the emotional aspect of the expectation with the on-going state of the events. Expectation far too often do not meet reality.
The gap between the reality and our expectation is our joy or pain. — Ursa
What we should focus and expectations that is superior and reasonable is that there is always a way. We should also expect frustration and disappointment to be dissipating precious energy. Manage outcomes especially when things that are beyond our control. Accept the situation for now, gain forward from the failed attempts. Use it as an experimental data to re-adapt your methods. Like how the 100 Day Game was designed, this is really a chess game that you play in your head with life. Shift both your attitude, paradigm and methodology. Whether sunshine, rain or thunder storms, it is just another situational Jumanji to play with.
"""
As long as anyone's inner nature remains inwardly stronger and richer than anything fate brings his way, good fortune will not depart him. For the superior man, everything furthers - even descent. - I ChingLife moves upwards and lets the mistakes sink down behind it. - I Ching
"""
Set The Grounds, Context and Scope
There are 2 realities we have to deal with —
1. What happens to us
2. What happens in our minds due to what happens to us.
This determines our modes, such as our happiness, hope and motivation, which in turn drives our energy to steer the next events. We need to control both, but first, we …
1. Control our mind
then with that …
2. Control the situation
Only a sound mind can manage a situation with soundness.
A man’s life is what his thoughts make of it. — Marcus Aurelius
A curmudgeon tries desperately to have a sense of hope, but is surrounded by people who are trying to take the wind out of his sails. — 60 Minutes commentator, Andy Rooney
Set The Ethos and Modes
We may not decide how the world should be, but we can influence it. We may not arbitrate the rules for how everyone should behave, but we can demand the basis.
Friends may not requite your help. People may not appreciate your work and effort. People can disappoint you. They can be dishonest, irresponsible, disrespectful (even when you earn it). Family and friends may not even requite your love despite your sacrifices. Events may end in debacles despite all the pain paid for. Do not punish yourself with further misery upon what is undeserved. Understand why, then change ourselves to set for the course of change itself. Be the change agent.
The Change Insurgent
The change insurgent operates with a different mandate and a different mind-set.
Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible. — Miguel de Unamuno
To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought. — Tom Robbins
We are continually faced with great opportunities, which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems. — Margaret Mead
Things are only impossible until they’re not. — Jean-Luc Picard
The Case of Soichiro Honda
A ticket will get you a seat in a movie theater, but a diploma won’t get you a job! — Soichiro Honda
Like most other countries, Japan was hit badly by the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1938, Soichiro Honda was still in school, when he started a little workshop to develop the piston ring.
His plan was to sell the idea to Toyota. He labored night and day, even slept in the workshop, always believing that he could perfect his design and produce a worthy product. His supportive wife offered her jewelry for pawn to get the working capital.
Finally, came the day where his piston ring was close to completion as a working sample for Toyota. Yet, only to be told that the rings did not meet their standards. Soichiro went back to school and suffered continuous ridicule. However, he refused to give up.
Rather than focus on his failure, Soichiro pressed on with his goal. After 2 more years of redesigning, he eventually won a contract with Toyota. Yet again, by then, the Japanese government was gearing up for war. Soichiro needed to build a factory to supply Toyota, but building materials were commandeered and, hence, expensive and in short supply.
Soichiro pressed on with the contract in hand. He invented a new concrete-making process that enabled him to build the factory cheaply. With that, he was ready for production. However, the war took the twist — the factory was bombed twice. Deepening the crisis, steel became unavailable.
Instead of accepting it as a seal to his end, Soichiro started collecting the undispensed gasoline cans discarded by US bombers used to support the post bombing. Soichiro called them — “Gifts from President Truman”. They became his new found raw materials for rebuilding his manufacturing process. Yet again … an earthquake destroyed the factory.
After the war, gasoline shortage forced people to walk or use bicycles. It crippled the automobile market. Soichiro innovated a vehicle — a primordial motorcycle — by building a tiny engine and attached it to his bicycle. His neighbors wanted one too, however, despite the demands for the new vehicle form, materials could not be found for him to supply the demand.
The common person would had given up by now. Not for Soichiro Honda. He wrote to 18,000 bicycles shop owners to exhort them to help him revitalize Japan. 5,000 responded and advanced him with whatever they could to build his miniaturized engines. The first models were too bulky to work well, but as usual he pressed on to re-develop and re-adapt, until the engine version, ‘The Super Cub” was born. This spark the first success in Japan, and Honda began exporting them to Europe and America.
Another gas shortage in the 1970s created the energy crisis. However, this time, it created the opportunity to move the automotive towards small efficient cars. Honda took that window of success.
Honda Corporation is now a global enterprise ranking as one of the world’s largest automobile companies.
Honda succeeded because he abided with his committed decision, acted upon it, and made adjustments, evolving from his failures. He recycled every failures, and refused to accept defeat.
Every stroke is evolved from defeat … I question the world of how many people can evolve lessons from defeat …
— Feng Qing Yang, Movie: The Swordsman (1990 film)
Understand The Butterfly Effect Of Your Present Intent
Each morning, we wake up to the same sun rise and issued the same 1440 minutes before the day is done. You can choose to use it or waste it. You can choose to tune your intent right from that moment for momentum or inertia.
Each time when something undesirable happens, we can choose to be a victim or collect it as a data reference to evolve from it. Every time someone comes to us with adverse treatment, we can choose to avoid it, react to it, or act on it proactively and progressively.
“Yeah, right, it’s not that easy”, you may remonstrate. Yet, just ask ourselves again, which versions of the outcome of the day, at least, do we prefer? We want to move forward, and whatever we can do, or find the will to do, is a choice we feed to our intent; and we can do that by questioning choice and intent that surfaces in our mind within every situation.
Every intent in our mind provokes a mood, which in turns affect us in choosing how we react to the situations. We have to condition ourselves to how we manage how people affect our mood, and how we create the same emotional externalities. The intent is the move in our mind before we move in our situation. Understanding and mastering the Butterfly Effect of your present intent is the key to your destiny.
The Black Swans Don’t Cry
The glory seen today in 21st-century Rome, from the coliseums, temples, baths, and aqueducts thousands of years old that are still in glorious display belied a tale that paint the ancient Romans as masterful builders. The picture builds a bias that concealed the other side of the story. The buildings seen today are actually the survivaling minority of what the Romans made; the others fell and were built over or buried, or in some cases torn apart to recycle the materials for other buildings, and thus, the failures were hidden within history. The engineering prowess were imperfect and overrated. Their ruling class did live in the glorious marble structures depicted in movies, but most Romans lived in collapse-prone tenements that killed thousands. This is the cautionary warning of engineering Availability or Rigged Heuristic or Survivorship Bias Heuristics.
This is where the availability heuristic substitutes one question for another: instead of estimating the frequency of an event you report an impression of the ease with which individual instances come to mind.
A study of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases to look for the data to fulfil it as a proof of reality. People remembered their preferences and efforts much more saliently. This is a form of systematic error of selecting and accumulating anecdotal evidence.
The media with propaganda agenda or corporate motives, and doctored history in education, etc, play a part in the misinformation imprinting in the minds of the population. The society is so saturated with delectable entertainment information, and news outlets only report about long-tail, highly improbable events to grab popular attention. Hardly anyone tunes in to reports of medical advancement, but chooses highly sensationalized stories about plane crashes, mass shootings and diseases that make it seem like the world is crumbling. The demand draws a cache of ‘availability cascade’, where the media wants poignant public reactions, which then becomes a controversial story itself, prompting further dratization. Deaths in terrorist plane hijackings are dwarfed by traffic deaths, but the gruesome images in the media are recalled far more swiftly, making it difficult to apply reason.Sensationalist tendencies also mean that extremist and radical views hijack our attention. Politicians paint with a vivid narrative of threats, stoking political analysts to vest time discussing them, and thence, further cementing the focus in the minds of the population. On election day, voters will be conditioned to more easily able to recall what demagogues stood for and make hasty judgement calls.
There are flight engineering organizations that keep a black primer of lessons extracted from the black boxes to derive design and engineering failures. The documents move aviation into modernization. Some of these are paid with lives.
The path of machine designs evolving forward to be more resilient and robust does not need to be waged with human lives, if humanity gives more attention, gravity and resources to research and empirical testing.
… to be continued …
1. Reasons Why We Fail
2. What Is Required To Succeed
3. The Mistakes That Most People Never Learn
4. What They Do Not Teach You
5. Common Bad Advice
6. How Positive Thinking Can Hurt You
7. Objective Positivism
8. What Should One Do In Their 20s To Avoid Regrets In Their 30s And 40s
9. Why Your Will Your Drive Your Wit And Any Of Your Ways Will Fail You
10. Set Yourself Started And Going
11. Fail Fast, Fail Functionally, Fail Forward
12. Tansformative Shifts The 1% Fulcrum On The 20–80 Pareto
13. Chaining The Behavioral Butterfly Effect
14. Are You With The Right People Or Just Lost With The Wrong Crowd
15. When Life Is Too Much For Us To Bear
16. Engineering Hope
17. How To Look For Your Purpose — The Search For An Elixir
18. Questions That Can Re-write Your Fate
19. Your Intent Writes Your Life
20. Lessons From The Eccentrics
21. In Pursuit Of Virtues And Values
22. The Expedition
23. The Alchemy Of Time Fate And Kairos