Does anybody remember the Scientific Method? If not, I encourage you to look it up and review. Essentially, it is a way of testing a hypothesis in a systematic way to ascertain affirmation of a hypothesis or to discredit it. Through these tests or experiments we gather data, the more data we gather, eventually the truth becomes apparent.
It was never intended that the first experiment would reveal the truth, but each failed experiment does reveal some truth. I have been thinking about this lately, and the many scientists I have known throughout my career, many that were much more educated, were a wealth of knowledge that I was able to learn from. At the same time, although I was less educated, I was able to teach them a few things.
Sometimes I refer to myself as an intuitive scientist. I have invented many things throughout my career, unfortunately, unbeknownst to me at the time, someone had already invented them first.
I think back to some of these interactions with these brilliant scientists and wonder how it could be possible that I could have anything to teach them. I think I have a clue that I would like to share with you.
Every living thing has the capacity to learn, we use this phenomenon to train animals to do amazing tricks. With the right motivation, you can train birds to pick up cigarette butts and discard them into a receptacle that will provide food in exchange for their efforts. In this example, the bird didn’t read some other bird’s theory on how to trade cigarette butts for food, they just learned it from being placed in the right environment.
The education system is very much about exposing a person to as much theoretical knowledge as possible. We memorize theories and formulas and are tested to see how well we “learned” the information. But did we really learn the information? Do we really understand?
I submit to you that this is not learning, this is more like looking in the back of the book for the answers. Real learning, real understanding is only possible by doing, by trying and failing.
Trying and failing is our primary learning mechanism. If you have children, you likely remember when your child attempted to stand up, there were several failures before the eventual success. You know what that child didn’t have? A fear of failing.
Fear of failing is learned. Many times, we instill this fear into our own children without knowing it, we instill this fear into our peers by ridiculing the failures, and belittling their efforts, we would never do this to a child, why then would we do this to a peer? How is this helpful?
I have failed many, many times, apparently, I have no fear of failure. In fact, on several occasions when I discussed what I was going to try to do, I was told that it wouldn’t work. My response is always the same, “I’m not smart enough to know that, so I am going to try”. In the beginning, it wouldn’t work, but every time I tried and failed, I learned something. Every failure built new neural pathways, every failure revealed a pattern, and eventually every pattern revealed the path to the solution. Eventually you learn that the path to the solution can be applied to every problem, and the failures become fewer, while the successes become more.
Why does failing matter?
Failing matters because it is the quickest path to the solution, you will never find the solution if you are afraid to fail. So go out and fail, but don’t fail miserably, fail spectacularly, it’s more fun!