I once knew a kid. If you have her a pretty marble, she’d bury it somewhere safe so it’s never scratched. If you gave her a seashell, she’d tuck it away neatly so it never breaks. And if you gave her a crystal pen she’d hide it until the ink ran dry.


I don’t know about you, but this story hits a little close to home… Being afraid to take chances, being afraid to make mistakes… In protecting what is so much, we lose out on the wonderful experiences that could be.
It becomes a way of life. Everything that we admire, we tuck away and never actually get to experience the beauty of it.

That’s why these two sentences stuck to me for the last few weeks of this Rice360 internship.

1. Fail fast
2. Have the experience to know when to give up

I heard the first statement from Dr. Holmes and I think there’s a few things embedded in it. Fail fast –

• Try new things. Mistakes are like a compass to show that you’re voyaging into unfamiliar territories. Because if you knew everything about everything, you’d know what to do and what not to, always, right…?

• Forgive yourself for your mistakes. It turns out, there’s usually no one harder on us than we are on ourselves. Our mistakes weigh on us the most and taunt us. Oh no, I failed… so what? Only in giving ourselves permission to fail do we fail forward.

 

It’s helped shape my perspective to now seeking mistakes and seeing success as just a pile of accidents and failures that form a heap of experiences. And at the very top of the heap lies the long-sought breakthrough.

Fail fast; this mantra particularly rings true for my team’s (FlowMetrics) Rice360 project. Try, fail, learn, then rinse and repeat. If it goes well, we get the experience, and if it doesn’t… we get the lessons.
Win-win!

 

The second statement was the response Kim Denney; the MD of Newport LLC gave to my question at our first networking lunch. “As someone who sees the potential in things and people and as such, never gives up on them, how do you know what things to actually give up on? Things that are doomed to fail no matter how hard you try. Or things that require more effort than their worth to work out?
How do you get the superpower of discernment?”

My question was in the context of engineering problems. Sometimes things just don’t work and spending more effort is a waste of time. Some other times, things require a lot of effort to eventually work and are very valuable. How do you differentiate between the two?

Her response reflected the 30 long years she’s spent developing her expertise: “First off, it’s not a superpower, it’s experience!”

According to her, when you’ve done something time and time again and it’s almost a second nature, it’s much easier to see when something’s going wrong, and to catch the anomaly before it’s too late.


All leading back to the first point. Making mistakes gives you the experience; the superpower of discernment. The power to see what is worth investing in and what’s better off abandoned.
In other words, mistakes teach you to not make mistakes… It’s almost counterintuitive.

Oh no, I failed… so what? Do it again!
Piles upon piles of errors and you find out many ways of not doing things. And especially why not to. Which leads you to doing things right.

As for that little girl… She never got to appreciate the beauty of the marble nor the seashell and she never got to see the amazing creations that could come of trailing the ink on a canvas…

That’s the real story of failure.


Now… go fail forward and make something awesome!

Motunrayo Sanyaolu,
Electrical Electronics Engineering,
Nigeria.