On swinging and missing

16 April, 2011

let’s make better mistakes tomorrow

- This is the title of an electronic album, but I first heard about it from Mike Montiero’s art.

The valuation of mistakes as a way of learning is not new. It’s an American ideal; persistence, that when one thing does not work out you try another. This manner of thinking has come under fire, particularly in the technology community. In a group as driven by startups, the attitude is possibly best summarized by Jason Fried (of 37 Signals) in his book ReWork¹. Though his writing is meant only to apply to startups and business endeavors, it is largely in line with the idea that failure at any point is bad.

From a chapter entitled “Failure is not a rite of passage”:

What do you really learn from mistakes? You might learn what not to do again, but how valuable is that? You still don’t know what you should do next.
(Kindle edition, location 205 of 1781)

Well, I’m here to say sometimes you don’t need to know what to do next to learn from a mistake. (Right after I point out that I completely took Fried’s above quote out of context, since I am talking about issues greater than a failed startup).

Sure, sometimes everything falls into place from inception. Some people go to a great school, get a great degree, go another great school for their PhD, then have their first big project become huge.

But even for someone like that - does that mean every decision they made along the way right? Or even perfect? Does that mean they never misallocated time? How far off track does something have to be for it to be considered a mistake?

That is the genesis of the title - much like an at bat in baseball, one strike does not make a failure. There are times when a batter swings at a pitch and misses and still goes on to have a successful at bat. In fact, being a team sport, there are times when a batter swings and intentionally misses the pitch. The point is that failure is very much a subjective term. It’s also impossible to see the results and ramifications of failure at the time. I mean, Steve Jobs dropped out of college, was that a personal failure? At the time it had to cross his mind.

Let me tell you about my failure.

I was working as a front-end web developer. I was good at what I did. I also knew I had to look for something new. I had not been challenged professionally for some time and was bored. So, took a job on the other side of the country to build device-embedded web apps. I was excited, finally a chance to use all those new CSS3 and HTML5 techniques I’d been reading about. The company was even willing to let me work from a satellite office after a few months, so I could move Austin, somewhere I’d wanted to be for a while, or back to Michigan.

As further a bonus, the risk professionally wasn’t as large as it could have been. Even though I was the senior developer at the company I was leaving and I was respected and in a place where I had a say in major decisions, the company was not ideal. It wasn’t a tech company, I was in a department that was tacked on to the existing corporate structure. To say they were clueless about proper development practices would be an understatement (sometime ask me about the 2 year process to get a webkit browser installed for testing).

So, I moved to Kirkland, Wa. for a job in nearby Bellevue. For the first month I loved it. I was working with cool technologies and building a cool application for a big client. I was thrilled to be working 12 hours a day. I was thrilled to do conference calls at 11pm getting demos ready for the next day. I thought I was in heaven.

But, then things changed.

The project finished up, and no more HTML was coming through the pipeline in the near future (this was Microsoft’s home turf, projects not including C# were rare), so I was given a Windows Phone 7 project to work on with a senior developer guiding me. I hated it. Once the work lost it’s luster i realized I was living in an unfamiliar town where I had no friends and, really, not even any acquaintances beyond the Papa John’s delivery guy. I was working with technologies I didn’t care about, with no idea when I would be able to work on things I wanted to do.

I was miserable.

I dealt with it for as long as I could. When I couldn’t take it anymore and was still sure things weren’t going to bet better I made the decision to write the Pacific Northwest up as a mistake. A huge embarrassing mistake.

So, I left.

Now, let me tell you why It was a wonderful mistake to make.

I still had my old apartment, I returned there and started looking for a job. After a week I had several responses to my resume. After 2 weeks I was getting several calls every day about setting up interviews. Nearly every business in Austin that I applied to responded. It took me a while to put it together, but it was very obvious when I realized what it was. Having “Web App Developer” on a resume put me into a high need field. I wasn’t just a front-end developer anymore, now I was a developer with some extra front-end expertise.

All of a sudden a few months in the rain, surrounded by Windows developers wasn’t all that bad. What was inarguably a mistake had become a great learning experience almost overnight. I was in demand, and good at what I did.

So I found a job with a great company. I’ve been here for a month and I’m happy with my work. More importantly I don’t see that changing anytime soon. My mistake paid off. To continue the baseball analogy, I hit a double on an 0-1 count.

So, I return to the epigraph. We are all going to make mistakes. They happen. They are unavoidable. What we can control is tomorrow. Learn from those mistakes, and once you have learned from them, and moved on, embrace them as a source of strength.

If I hadn’t made the mistake of moving across the country I would still be in a job where I wasn’t challenged, where I wasn’t learning, where I wasn’t happy.

So, let’s all make better mistakes tomorrow. Think how great things would be if we did.

¹ Seriously, read Rework, it’s a great book, even if you aren’t in the startup culture