A Fan of Failure

A Mistake is Just Information

I am a fan of failure. When confronted with failing to make the light bulb a thousand times, Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that won’t work.” A mistake is just information.

Failures, errors, omissions, faults, glitches, and anomalies are not defeats. In fact, the scientific method consists of isolating these things as variables to prove or disprove hypotheses. Each failure is a signal that narrows the field toward a solution.

Musical Fluency and the Power of Pivoting

When we start learning music, we develop the vocabulary we need to move forward. As we make mistakes, we find ways to avoid them. We find a new fingering or a place to take a breath, and every time we do, we learn something new. Improvisation is the pinnacle of this learning.

A professional isn't just reciting a memorized sequence of notes; their deep knowledge gives them the ability to pivot when something doesn't go as expected. They have the fluency to navigate changes in the moment and reshape the performance in real time.

Practicing Failure as a Scientific Method

Practicing music is the scientific method. We use our mistakes to learn better ways. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to learn technology by rote, limiting the scope of our learning to what we need at the time: never asking why and never getting past "Hot Cross Buns."

When we start to ask why, we empower ourselves with curiosity. If technology always worked, we wouldn't have a job—The job is fixing the solution when it fails. The best way to find a solution is for every decision to have a "why."

The Blank Slate Approach

I want my students to understand that authority comes from the thousand times that didn't work. In reality, any type of practice is actually practicing failure. Every time our "why" fails, we learn to define our reasoning and harden our solution.

Breaking the Black Box

Turnkey solutions treat the user as a liability, hiding infrastructure behind automation. When users encounter unexpected failures, a black box drops them into panic. Knowing exactly *why* a failure happens eliminates the worry. A transparent system allows us to confidently isolate the fault and pivot.

Framing practice as failure leads to two paths. Ideally, we find a hardened solution. But in critical moments, a "good enough" fix is necessary. Past failures provide the stop-gap solutions needed to survive the moment.

Conclusion: Mastery is Resilience

"Good enough" fixes bring us full circle. We use previous failures as solutions to current problems. A violinist practices cadenzas, technologists practice failures.

Mastery is not the absence of errors. It is the ability to look at a broken system and rely on the vocabulary built from every mistake that came before. Fix the solution when it fails; that is the job.