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Chaim Gingold has a great essay that expands on related ideas, at http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/01/catastrophic-prototypi... In particular, the following remarks from Gingold's essay complement the OP well: "My hard drive was full of failures. Twelve years after learning to program, I looked back on all my software: none of it was finished, and what was, wasn’t ambitious enough. The projects that started out ambitiously always seemed to fall back to earth, like failed rockets lacking the power to propel their own weight into orbit. Sure, there were interesting ideas in there, lots of wacky toys, and I had even attempted a few large projects, but none of them ever came together like the cool games and software I had always admired. Sure, I had become a pretty good programmer, and learned to make cool stuff, but clearly none of it would ever amount to anything. I just didn’t have what it took. I went to graduate school at Georgia Tech, and read some Chris Crawford. I learned that he had the same problem. But he didn’t think of it as failure. For him, this was an organic part of the development process. The failures filling his hard drive were actually “prototypes” that helped him decide which ideas were worth pursuing. For each good idea, there were a large number of stupid ones that didn’t work out. Failing, for this successful designer, was a way to find the good ideas. The revelation hit me like a ton of bricks. Maybe I had a chance after all... Master artists like Escher or Van Gogh don’t just sit down and crank out a finished piece. Artists create numerous sketches and studies before they undertake finished paintings, let alone masterpieces... All of my software failures, which I was now thinking about as prototypes, sketches, and studies, had taught me a thing or two about design and programming. If you want to learn to draw, you have to make a ton of bad drawings first. The difference between practice and failure is simply a matter of attitude." These ideas are, of course, not new, but Gingold has thought about them deeply and distilled them sharply. The essay as a whole goes much further than the above excerpt, and is well worth reading. |
I recently pulled out some code from over 20 years ago, an experiment in mixing fuzzy logic and Conway's Life that... didn't exactly work out. But it had some intriguing results. Was it a "failure"? Not in the least: it produced results that were intriguing enough for me to remember two decades later, even though it never "came to anything" in the meantime.
That said, I do like the word "failure", and I'm happy to say, "My hard drive is full of failures!" It just sounds better than "practice" and it challenges anyone I say it to. What can they say in reply?
The world is full of little people desperately attempting to tear you down. When you say, "My hard drive is full of failures" they have nothing to come back with. They know you've actually done something, which is more than they have. So go forth and embrace your failures. They prove you're alive, and doing something interesting with your life.
My attitude is in part informed by this quote: "One word characterized the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perseveringly during fifty-five years; that word is FAILURE" -- Sir William Thomson. If Lord Kelvin can fail, so can I, damnit!