Learning Mastery 3 – Fail Early, Fail Often

This is the third part of my Learning Mastery series. Last time, I touched on the subject of failure. This time I’ll take it a lot further.

Why Failure Is Good For Your Learning

Failure is natural feedback. Every time you fail, you get a message about how well you’re doing, and you get a chance to change something.

It’s quite natural to try and avoid failure. We don’t like failing. It makes us look bad in front of other people. It makes us feel bad (unless viewed correctly – which is what I’m teaching you here). In fact, it makes sense to try and avoid failure, because if you avoid failure, that means you’re doing good, right?

Wrong.

I recently learned to snowboard. And I didn’t do it by avoiding failure. If I tried to avoid falling, I would ride down the whole piste sideways (the snowboard perpendicular to the hill, me facing forward.) But that wouldn’t let me learn much. It would also be pretty tiring for my legs, and it wouldn’t be fun.

So instead I embraced failure. I tried figuring out how all the motions affect the way I ride. What happens when I put more weight on the front foot, or how twisting my body affects the riding. I fell like 50 times the first day, and I didn’t mind. That isn’t to say I was intentionally falling the whole time, but I didn’t care if I did. My goal was to quickly figure out how my motions affect the ride, and that’s what I did.

Which brings me to the first rule of welcoming failure:

Welcoming Failure – Rule 1:
Don’t worry about failure. It’s quite natural to fail and look bad a lot when you’re first learning something.

And so I learned snowboarding in two days. Or about 7 net hours (including breaks drinking wonderful swiss hot chocolate). The third day I just enjoyed the snowboarding, without worrying about learning. (I’ll talk some more about “fun and learning” later in this article.)

Fail Often

Not worrying about failure is just the first step. The next step is rigging the circumstances so that you fail more often.

I like to think of this concept as the development cycle, based on my favorite Linux distribution, Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a six-month development cycle – meaning a new major version comes out every six months.

This gives Ubuntu a lot of opportunity to get feedback and improve. And that’s why it’s a lot better operating system than Windows Vista (whose development cycle took some six YEARS).

Shorten your development cycle

So how you do use this idea of a development cycle? Let’s say you want to learn to draw. Don’t start by drawing a full-size painting. Start by making small drawings. That way you can finish a dozen drawings in the time it would otherwise take you to finish one. You fail a dozen times more often, and get dozen times more feedback. It lets you improve much faster.

Welcoming Failure – Rule 2:
Shorten your development cycle. You will fail more often, get more feedback, and learn faster.

But as with all rules, you can’t take it too far. If you tried making a drawing every thirty seconds, you wouldn’t learn much.

You need a certain amount of time to learn new things. If you set your development cycle too short, you won’t learn much. It has to do with *Post-Practice Improvement* and the fact that you need time to accumulate feedback. Also, if you do things too quickly, you tend to pick up bad habits (like stress).

In my time, I’ve learned many board games, like chess and draughts. I learned you need to find the right development cycle there too. I found that 5-minute games (5 minutes per person per game) are better than 30-minute games for learning. But taking it too far, like 1-minute games, I can’t do all the thinking and analysis I need to really learn. And playing without thinking simply doesn’t help you learn.

Which brings me to Rule 2.5 , complementing Rule 2.

Welcoming failure – Rule 2.5:
Only shorten your development cycle so much that you can still maintain full attention. If you find yourself doing things too fast and without thinking, you probably set your development cycle too short.

Now you know as much about failure as a seasoned hunter knows about tracking animals. Get out there and fail! (somehow this sentence didn’t come out as motivational as I imagined)

Fun and Learning

I’ve been talking about learning so much you might come to think the point of doing anything is to get better. Well guess what… just getting better at something won’t do you any good unless you enjoy it.

From my experience, we learn about 95% of our skills for fun. We learn the other 5% because we need them for something else we’re doing (you might learn about marketing and how to sell something because you need it for your job. Then again, if your job involves selling things, you probably enjoy it – so that would fit under fun.).

This gives us today’s final rule (or rather guideline – I’m not forcing you into this):

Guideline 3:
Have fun.

Yet there are times when you can sacrifice a bit of fun now, to have more fun later. For example learning a piano piece. You could just start slowly playing both hands from the beginning of the piece, and get mild enjoyment since it sounds something like the original. Or you could practice to maxmize learning (you pianists out there – see Fundamentals of Piano Exercise). You would take a few days to learn the piece well. Then you could spend weeks playing it well, at full speed, with all the nuances you want.

You would be trading off a few days of mild enjoyment now for weeks of real fun later.

You might also find yourself in situations where you can just have fun now… or delay it a bit to have MORE fun later. Use your judgment and decide what you prefer in the situation. I sometimes choose to simply have fun now – it’s a perfectly fine decision.

Stay tuned for the next article in the Learning Mastery Series. We will explore how you can help yourself learn by helping others, how to chop up a skill into smaller bits for easier learning, and the fine art of hypothesising.

Previous: Learning Mastery 2 – Post-Practice Improvement

Next:Learning Mastery 4 – Teach It And Hypothesise

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About my last blog post:

You regular readers out there might have noticed my last blog post was pretty random… and out of schedule. The fact is, I woke up in the middle of the night and had this totally hilarious idea (it seemed hilarious at the time). I couldn’t get back to sleep until I wrote it down. And since I’d written it down, I figured I might as well post it.

When I woke up in the morning, I read the post again. It was only half as funny as it seemed at 4 am. (still funny enough so that I would post it anyway)

I learned something, and figured I might as well share it with you:

If you have a brilliant humor idea, write it down, then wait 24 hours. If it still seems funny, you can do something with it.