blog > failure is progress

Failure is the foundation for literally everything

So you feel like a failure. Perhaps you try and try and try but it never works out. You’re learning lessons and applying them but still things don’t work out.

Here’s the thing about “fucking up”:

Engineering projects are literally tens and usually hundreds and sometimes thousands of failures. How many fuck-ups occur simply depends on the complexity of the project. But they ALWAYS occur. Multiple times in multiple ways.

Until the final time. When it works. And success is achieved.

Are you an engineer? Perhaps not. So what does this have to do with you?

Engineers and engineering aren’t some special conceptual things. Engineers are regular people and engineering challenges are like any other challenge. The difference is that in the engineering profession failure is not only accepted, it’s expected. It’s understood that there’s no way around it. Nobody knows everything and you have to start doing a thing to figure out what won’t work.

And every time you figure out what doesn’t work you change it. And then find out the next thing that doesn’t work. Rinse and repeat. Keep iterating until nothing breaks and you get the desired result.

And it’s accepted and expected that there may be *many* iterations before success is achieved. In fact, as many as it takes.

So if the advances mankind has made are built on failure why do we celebrate them? Because it’s not the failures that matter. It’s the final outcome.

If you feel like you’ve screwed up, that’s fine. You’re just an engineer who’s project is your own life. Keep iterating, keep learning. Keep trying out different solutions. And if you need to beef up your resilience take a look here.