#1251 - Make it an experiment
Failure sucks.
I know that we can learn a lot through failures, but so we can through success. And the latter is way more pleasant.
To learn from either failure or success, we need to invest enough time in reflection because, as John Dewey wrote, "we do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience."
Failure happens.
As much as it sucks, it's almost impossible to do anything meaningful in life without having to deal with some failures.
So, as many people smarter than I suggest, we have to suck it up when it happens.
We take the failure, deal with the pain and do our best to extract some valuable lessons for the future.
To make dealing with failure less of a struggle, I've learned to take everything as an experiment.
An experiment is a procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact. We experiment anytime we want to learn something or to discover if something works or is true.
The magic of experiments is that they can't fail. Even if what we set out to do doesn't work, the experiment is successful because we have discovered something valuable: our idea doesn't work.
Don't get me wrong. It still sucks.
But because we have designed the learning in the experiment, when the failure happens, we are ready to extract the teaching, ease the pain and move forward without getting stuck in the negative outcome.