Failure is Feedback
Embracing life, one bug at a time
Growing up, I hated failing. I stressed over games that were too difficult (I see you Cloud World). I was not a natural at sports. My family prized intelligence over emotion. The one game I did enjoy included a dog that would pop onto the screen and laugh once I missed the target several times.
Failure was to be avoided at all costs - but it felt like failing was all I ever did.
Consider math.
As a younger person, I didn’t know that because I was a visual learner, I needed to see how something worked in order to understand it. Multiplication and division seemed like a mystery to me. Multiplication facts, emblazoned on a large poster, were to be memorized. I felt like a failure before I began. I couldn’t grasp what the numbers meant. My grades (and my confidence) remained poor until I hit Algebra. This made sense! I could see what was happening to the numbers as I followed the formulas (and I could use a calculator - thank God!)
Growing up, I thought something was wrong with me. I couldn’t avoid failure and I didn’t know how to grow and become better. I hated the ridicule and shame that came with it. To say I remained stuck for many years is an understatement.
Oddly enough, it took working with a WordPress blog that offered a new way to view failure.
While writing, I discovered if I changed the numbers on <h> tags, the text changed format. I had no idea why. It was simple cause and effect. Curious, I took a front-end course at Code Louisville. From there I took my first job as a QA Analyst where it became my job to find failures! I learned how to test, report bugs, and experiment further.
As my career progressed, I learned that when I came across a failure, many developers were thankful! It wasn’t a hit to their ego. They hoped I would find defects they missed to produce a better product. When creating automated tests, I used failures as feedback to figure out what I wasn’t doing correctly. Even getting a different error was a relief if I’d been stuck on one error for longer than expected.
A turning point came for me while listening to a podcast about when to know if instinct was guiding a decision. While I can’t remember the episode, the content focused on this, “…If you just aren’t sure which direction you should go with, pick one! Go for it! If it doesn’t work, you can always course-correct.” I instantly realized that I could try things, experiment, fail, and pivot without feeling bad or shameful. I had the freedom to fail because I didn’t have to believe the narrative that shame would be attached to the experience.
Now, when I fail, make a mistake, do something incorrectly, or mess up, I look at it (or I do my absolute best!!) as a form of feedback. I learn from it and take the next steps. I can always course-correct. Shame and fear may be present, but I don’t have to accept them as par for the course. I can “read the errors”, either in software or in life, and make changes.
When I first started writing on topics of Quality Assurance, I wanted to call it, “Talk Dumb to Me” because many times, I feel stupid when I’m approaching a problem and don’t know how to fix it. What I’ve learned is that to fix any problem, you have to start by doing things badly and learn along the way. My goal here is to create the documentation I needed at different points in my career. Hopefully, the information here helps you as well.
So, yeah, let the dogs laugh. Be misunderstood. Don’t worry about skills that are prized over another. The goal always is, to tell the truth and make decisions from there. And, don’t worry about Cloud World. There are better things to do 😅
Till next time…
