I have always been curious and willing to risk failure to obtain new information. It is great mental fun to take things apart, understand the parts, put them back together, and have some pieces left over! It is a greater challenge to synthesize new ideas using easily available parts of things. This is the art and science of invention, and it is what the brain does so well. We can look at a paper clip and see that is useful for holding papers together, or, we can see that it will be a different item if we straighten it out, bend it differently, or connect it to something else. Ideas can be impromptu, or well planned in advance. We can then assemble, fabricate, or try out our idea and see if it works or not. It is then easy to say that it is a success or failure. But, it comes down to how we define failure and that is the thought about this post. Failure can be a good outcome.
Adam Savage, from the TV show MythBusters says it best: "There's a phrase I came up with early on in doing the show: "Failure is always an option." I had that printed on our crew hats and crew shirts and I realized, in fact, it is a deeply scientific phrase because people think of an experiment as something set out to prove something. And it's not. It's something set out to test something. So whether you're right or wrong about your preconceptions, the experiment that yields data is still a successful experiment. That's what we mean by "Failure is always an option."
As the webmaster for this site I am constantly trying to present interesting and useful ideas and commentary and sometimes I succeed, and sometimes not so much. Particularly for the Science/Experiments page, I am working on several ideas at the same time. In the past three weeks I have had a lot of ideas that did not work. I believe that frustration is proportional to the time spent on a project, and I do get frustrated. But, when I weigh what I have learned during those "failures" against what has succeeded, I feel that frustration goes away, but that the information builds on future projects. So here is a tip of the inventors hat to failure....
Adam Savage, from the TV show MythBusters says it best: "There's a phrase I came up with early on in doing the show: "Failure is always an option." I had that printed on our crew hats and crew shirts and I realized, in fact, it is a deeply scientific phrase because people think of an experiment as something set out to prove something. And it's not. It's something set out to test something. So whether you're right or wrong about your preconceptions, the experiment that yields data is still a successful experiment. That's what we mean by "Failure is always an option."
As the webmaster for this site I am constantly trying to present interesting and useful ideas and commentary and sometimes I succeed, and sometimes not so much. Particularly for the Science/Experiments page, I am working on several ideas at the same time. In the past three weeks I have had a lot of ideas that did not work. I believe that frustration is proportional to the time spent on a project, and I do get frustrated. But, when I weigh what I have learned during those "failures" against what has succeeded, I feel that frustration goes away, but that the information builds on future projects. So here is a tip of the inventors hat to failure....
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