Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention
by atoav on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:10PM
(#31829133)
I am an improvisational musician. The key to invent from failure is to develope a ever present sense of observing oneself from the outside. The instead of being emberassed when something goes wrong, one can "feel" the potentials that might lurk in where it went wrong.
John Cage once said: If you make a mistake, repeat it.
A trumpeter getting stuck once in a melody is clearly a mistake, them doing the same thing again, and then spinning the thing into a different direction is not only perceived as interesting, it is probably one of the moments where their true genius will become visible the most.
Key to this is to not be too attached to the plan, but to the goal. The plan is that melody you had in mind, or on the sheet. The goal is to play interesting music. If the plan is in the way of playing interesting music, ditch it. If the an is no longer feasible because you fucked up, the plan needs to be adjusted.
This sounds logical for music, but in all other domains (except maybe art and design) people have a very hard time ditching or adjusting the plans immidiately at the point of failure. Kill your darlings and you will get new ones.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention
by amfortas7 on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @06:54PM
(#31830039)
One of the greatest piece of music of all time is the fruit of a blatant mistake: Keith Jarrett's Köln concert.
Instead of the required Bösendorfer 290 Imperial, the organization team brought a smaller and badly tuned piano on stage. Jarrett - who was a bit of a diva at times - initially refused to play, but gave in, and the recording is the thing of legends.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention
by puranjay on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:14PM
(#31829183)
Improv of any kind, in general, is fantastic for learning how to fail publicly. I do a bit of improv comedy and its fantastic for getting you out to make a fool of yourself publicly. Some of the best work in improv comes from people failing and flailing and channeling that into something fantastic.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention
by A4ET8a8uTh0 on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @04:12PM
(#31828584)
And yet at most companies, you are not allowed to even contemplate such a crazy idea. Need for absolute certainty and stability generate conservative committees ( and committee members ), who loathe but to say anything definitive.
Granted, I mostly saw it in banking, but I assume it is not that uncommon.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention
by paulpauper on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:43PM
(#31829436)
this notion that you need to fail seems wrong. Facebook, Microsoft, google never came close to failing and never had big failures yet still had innovations.
That's just products. If you go into security breaches, lawsuits, and operating procedures, you could list several more.
These companies are large enough to have big failures and still keep kicking, and have people start to forget the failures over time (I had forgotten several of these myself). But they definitely aren't immune to having big failures.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention
by paulpauper on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @07:11PM
(#31830185)
The iPod was a do or die moment for Apple. It's not like there was much margin for error. Fakebook's main product was an immediate and huge success. Its other product failures were tiny compared to this huge success.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention
by jjulius on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @06:07PM
(#31829652)
>I think his point was their very first product was a success. No failures required.
Except those companies, or the people who founded them, also had early failures. For instance, Zuckerberg's original site was more akin to "Hot or Not" than Facebook and got shut down by Harvard. Gates certainly had failures, as did Larry and Sergey. Just because the company they founded was successful from inception doesn't mean it wasn't a struggle to figure out how to get there. It would be wild to me to assume that there are people out there, walking among us, who have never failed.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention
by danielmarkbruce on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @06:52PM
(#31830025)
Gates was a teen, as was zuckerberg. They were tiny failures. I don't believe Larry or Sergey failed at anything much before google. It was a little problematic afterwards because their mental model for building businesses was pretty distorted by their immediate, crazy success.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention
by antihipocrat on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:55PM
(#31829542)
How many iterations of search engine algorithms were tried before finding a solution that beat the competition? Google now kills many of its own products that don't live up to expectations.
Microsoft has had a number of failed products, even some versions of windows are considered to be failures.
Each company has learned from the failures though, which I think is a main point of the article.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention
by soSadm4n on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @06:54PM
(#31830043)
It’s a poetic take on relativity and knowledge acquisition.
Can’t be here until you observed back there, because here does not exist without having moved from back there to here.
Qualifying it as failure is subjective and crap poetry coupled to contemporary productivity culture. It’s a success in that you learned. It’s only a failure because it didn’t unicorn.
John Cage once said: If you make a mistake, repeat it.
A trumpeter getting stuck once in a melody is clearly a mistake, them doing the same thing again, and then spinning the thing into a different direction is not only perceived as interesting, it is probably one of the moments where their true genius will become visible the most.
Key to this is to not be too attached to the plan, but to the goal. The plan is that melody you had in mind, or on the sheet. The goal is to play interesting music. If the plan is in the way of playing interesting music, ditch it. If the an is no longer feasible because you fucked up, the plan needs to be adjusted.
This sounds logical for music, but in all other domains (except maybe art and design) people have a very hard time ditching or adjusting the plans immidiately at the point of failure. Kill your darlings and you will get new ones.
Instead of the required Bösendorfer 290 Imperial, the organization team brought a smaller and badly tuned piano on stage. Jarrett - who was a bit of a diva at times - initially refused to play, but gave in, and the recording is the thing of legends.
I love the "failures" of Victor Borge
(check out youtube videos)
Granted, I mostly saw it in banking, but I assume it is not that uncommon.
The opposite of Exploration is Exploitation. Exploitation minimizes known failure, at the cost of also minimizing invention.
Google: Wave, Orkut, Google+, Google Video, Google Glass [1]
Microsoft: Band, Bob, Kin, Zune, Lumia, Windows 8 [2]
Facebook: Poke, Parse, Beacon, Credits, Paper, Slingshot, Libra [3]
That's just products. If you go into security breaches, lawsuits, and operating procedures, you could list several more.
These companies are large enough to have big failures and still keep kicking, and have people start to forget the failures over time (I had forgotten several of these myself). But they definitely aren't immune to having big failures.
[1]: https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2018/2/26/googles-product-fai...
[2]: https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-failures-windows-vista-cortana...
[3]: https://startuptalky.com/facebook-failed-products/
Except those companies, or the people who founded them, also had early failures. For instance, Zuckerberg's original site was more akin to "Hot or Not" than Facebook and got shut down by Harvard. Gates certainly had failures, as did Larry and Sergey. Just because the company they founded was successful from inception doesn't mean it wasn't a struggle to figure out how to get there. It would be wild to me to assume that there are people out there, walking among us, who have never failed.
https://www.vox.com/2014/2/25/11623922/meet-facebooks-gravey...
>Microsoft
Zune
>Google
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Microsoft has had a number of failed products, even some versions of windows are considered to be failures.
Each company has learned from the failures though, which I think is a main point of the article.
Can’t be here until you observed back there, because here does not exist without having moved from back there to here.
Qualifying it as failure is subjective and crap poetry coupled to contemporary productivity culture. It’s a success in that you learned. It’s only a failure because it didn’t unicorn.
If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't making anything.