The Failure Swapshop
I ran two sessions at #bcbomo3, one on ableton live and the other… The Failure Swapshop
My aim for the session was to encourage people to celebrate their failures and share with the group the lessons they learned.
It went a bit like this:
“Hi, my name’s Luke, and I failed” (cue cheers + applause from the crowd)
“I did ___, it failed because of ___ and the lesson I learned was ___”
I kicked off the celebration of failure by talking about a start-up I worked on many years ago that lost its way and failed.
After a slow start, where people needed encouragement at first, the session really got going and more and more people opened up and shared business, personal and technical failures. Some were valuable life lessons, some… well… simply hilarious!
I wrote any lessons learned onto the white board (both sensible + silly):
- Stay on target (Stay focussed)
- Don’t lie about your abilities (but if you already have, learn the thing you said you could do asap!)
- Don’t trust:
- Grown ups
- Other people’s code
- Your own code
- Lotus Notes
- Consultants
- Programmers
- Acronyms
- Back ups = Good
- Don’t get distracted by shiny things
- Don’t think you know it all
- Check for typos
- Always check the box contents
- Try a restart
- Don’t try to be funny (the story behind this one was BRILLIANT, I won’t recount it here)
- Don’t expose your dev server to the world
- Ask for help
- Failure can become a win
If you’d like to share your failure, please do add a comment below and tell us what happened and most importantly what you learned from your glorious failure.
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