A few days ago I went for a run when I saw a small plane flying straight up into the air. I kept watching as suddenly – horrifically – it stalled. My mind raced through scenarios of me jumping into traffic to get anyone’s attention so the authorities could be alerted to the impending crash.
Then, after just a couple of seconds of torture, the plane recovered. And stalled again. And recovered again. And so on.
The pilot in training was apparently practicing recovering from a stall. He was practicing failing, or at least practicing in case of a failure.
It brought to mind a lesson I learned from Seth Godin about failing often. The idea is that if you’re not failing regularly, you’re not innovating or trying new things regularly enough. The key – like the pilot – is to fail small. The idea isn’t to fail so hard that you can’t recover from it. The idea is to try some small, new thing every day. Tweak your process a little and see what happens.
If it works, great. Try something else.
If not, great. It didn’t hurt that bad.
Take what you learned today and try something new tomorrow.
June 26, 2018