Choosing Failure
summary
Argues for deliberately inducing and learning from failures: runs the marshmallow tower exercise as evidence that iterative prototyping beats overplanning, uses Ruby on Rails workshops where intentionally showing red screens and using Google/Stack Overflow teaches recovery, recounts breaking master as a turning point for faster learning, and contrasts measuring success by few mistakes with measuring readiness to handle outages. Offers purposeful failure as a practice to surface hidden assumptions, improve designs, and speed up real-world competence.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:07Why avoid failure
- 2:54Marshmallow tower lesson
- 7:06Design process in tech
- 10:16Danger of competence illusion
- 12:45Learning through mistakes
- 15:15Teaching with purposeful failure
- 18:47Embrace unexpected outcomes
- 20:10Competence and mistakes
- 21:39Call to choose failure
