Positively Glorious!

Yesterday, I saw an interesting snippet on Manton Reece’s blog. It’s actually a snippet of a snippet, because it was originally written by Seth Godin:

When I was at MOMA last week, I saw a list of director and artist Tim Burton’s projects. Here’s the guy who’s responsible for some of the most breathtaking movies of his generation, and the real surprise is this: almost every year over the last thirty, he worked on one or more exciting projects that were never green lighted and produced. Every year, he spent an enormous amount of time on failed projects.

This is not at all a surprise to me, because I do the same thing.

Dead Parrots

One year, while still at the College of Charleston and back when my name was still Pennington, I counted 10 projects that I was working/had worked on.

One was an autonomous underwater vehicle, created from a radio controlled submarine and designed to sample water quality.¹

Another project was coastalgeology.org, a site dedicated to promoting coastal geology data collection and stewardship.² That project is now just an undead part of Project Oceanica.

Another was the Egg0 programming framework, a Python-based robotics language for teaching robotics to children. That project was coincident with another project to design a new “better than mindstorms” robotics system. It was a Handy Board-inspired robotics board that I designed the electronics for, but which I never produced beyond prototype.

There were others, like the zero-gravity particle separator that allowed me and a team of CofC students to go to Houston and fly on NASA’s zero-gravity plane.³

The common thread with all of those projects is this: They all died.

I had 10 projects I tried in undergrad– Ten– and all but one of them died.

That’s a 90% loss ratio.

This, in my opinion, is A Good Thing™.

Wasted Time

During this same time, I had an argument with my (very soon to be ex-)girlfriend at the time once that went something like this:

Her: “You never finish anything you start!”

Me: “Sure I do, I just don’t finish everything I start. I’m happy if I finish about 10% of what I start.”

Her (cynically): “So, you’re happy just throwing everything away? You waste 90% of your time! I’m not happy with that!”

Me: “I’m not wasting 90% of my time. I’m spending 90% of my time learning. Some things work, some don’t. If I don’t try, then I won’t know which ones will.”

It’s something that I have a problem explaining to people often, and it’s even caused issues with my lovely wife. The problem is that I’m a failure, and that most people have a view that “you have to finish what you start.”

More importantly, they have the view that “If you’re not going to finish it, then don’t start it.”

I agree with this, partially. I think it’s important to finish what you start. But there’s a subtle difference in that I also believe that you should let things die if they are going to become the undead⁴. Also, you should not ever be afraid to start things that probably won’t work.

In short, I believe strongly that you should set yourself up for failure. Because it’s by exploring the boundaries of what you can accomplish that you find out what your boundaries truly are.

Here’s a hint: Your boundaries are, without exception, far beyond what you think they are.

An Example From Pottery

If you learn to learn from what you fail at, then failure is the greatest tool you have.

As an example: I used to be a potter, and I would purposely make pottery on my wheel that would collapse while I was spinning it. Purposely. Why? Because I came so familiar with the failure-point of clay that I could push that clay right to the edge with confidence.

I made pottery that most others in my pottery classes couldn’t, or wouldn’t, because they were afraid it would collapse. I, on the other hand, went straight for collapse. I set myself up for failure.

It’s a common habit of mine. I fail about 90% of the time.

So, what was the one project that was a success during those years?

A robotics program for 8th grade students that became a 3 year program in the Charleston school district. There was also a spinoff “introduction to programming” class that I offered through community education.

Keep this in mind, I was an undergrad in college, without a teaching degree, who’d never taught before, who’d recently taught himself about robotics so was at best dubiously qualified to know anything about them.

Despite this, I decided to build a middle school instructional curriculum and offer it to the school district. If anyone was setting themselves up for failure, I was.

I was reaching for a goal that was ridiculously far beyond my own boundaries, and I found that my boundaries were much farther than I thought.

Nothing special

The important point here is that I’m nothing special. I don’t relate this to talk about the greatness that is me. I’m not great at all. I’m just as mediocre as anyone else out there with the exception of one simple thing:

I’m willing to fail.

That project was certain to fail. But I said “what the hell?” and I tried it out.

And the other projects? The ones that did fail?

What is failure?

I learned a ton about robotics, flew in the Zero-G plane, learned two new programming languages, and at the end of it taught a bunch of kids and adults programming and robotics.

If that’s failure, I say “bring it on!”

Someone once said that 90% of success is just showing up. I think it’s even easier than that.

I think that 90% of success is just failing.

1. It worked, somewhat. It’s now somewhere at the bottom of the Charleston harbor. [↩]
2. and now available only as a shadow of a memory on The Wayback Machine [↩]
3. That was fun, but the particle separator was shite, and luckily buried before embarrassment struck. [↩]
4. what I call vampireware, projects that are not dead, but which still walk the earth sucking the life of out everyone they touch. [↩]