failure – Andrew’s thoughts & observations

A big failure

Apple foke tend to update their software all the time. PC guys, not so much, partly because it’s easy to get burned in the process.

What started as a humble driver update, has turned into 30 plus hours of server hell. Trying to get a server back online and it doesn’t want to play ball. I don’t want to bore you with the details, but I will reflect on its effect on me.

At first the problem wasn’t a big deal, until it grew and grew in size. Then I had a dinner date, I was half able to put the problem aside for 2 hours while I ate with my friends, but upon returning home I spent the next 3 hrs focused on the problem. During those hours I realised I had been a bit snappy at my friends.

A typical case of burning the candle at both ends, I went to sleep late and arose early to try and the server back online. Total time in bed < 6 hrs. To which I spent an her working on remotely before heading to the office. I’m not sure when the pounding headache started, I think it was around 8am, just like someone slowly increasing their grip on my head. I’m not sure whether it’s the underlying pressure knowing that numerous staff are unable to fully, effectively work, or poor posture sitting at a laptop, or something completely different causing this sensation in my head.

I spent another 4 hours banging away at the keyboard, trying to solve the problem this way and that way. Nothing seeming to work. I had to force myself to take a break for an hour by leaving the office and going down the street for lunch.

Another hour and bit later and my thoughts were interrupted as my phone went off, reminding me of my physio appointment for that afternoon “bugger”. I headed off to the appointment and as I sat in the waiting room, still trying to process the answer of the all consuming problem.

The physio asked me “it looks like you’ve got something on your mind?” I was physically showing signs of this issue. I returned from the physio where I have spent another 5 hours thinking and processing the problem.

Unfortunately there isn’t an easy answer (or at least I can’t find one).

So at this stage it looks like I’ll be going with plan M (A through to L have failed me), a complete rebuild. Just the way I wanted to spend my day off.

I’m physically worn out, I have a shocking head ache and all over a simple computer update that went wrong.

It amazing how work can weigh so heavily on us. Like really, all I do is type and click, how can that get this heavy? Sometimes things are too heavy, because we are trying to lift more than we can manage. The thought going through my head tonight is “I’m never going to make a career out of being a cheap system admin, it’s just not worth it.” It was a fun challenge for a season, but that season has passed.

Loving to fail

There’s few things that concerns a teenage boy. Usually the list is along the lines of

Eat lots
Do well enough at school to pass
Try and impress the girl you like for that week/month.

Today I was reminded of an experience centred around that last point and our theme for the week on failure. There was this girl, I thought she was rather attractive, she knew my name (which is a plus), and we could even hold a small conversation. The only strange thing was, she wasn’t really into boys at the time, let alone me.

Her birthday was coming up and one of mates thought a big romantic gesture would be sure to move the needle in my favour. However I probably should have been skeptical with the way he [would] have phrased it “girls love flowers and romantic shit”.

It wasn’t until much later in life I discovered the words of Tim Kreider and as an outsider looking onto a situation like the one unfolding how his words ring true.

There’s a fine line between the bold romantic gesture and stalking. The tricky crux of the matter is the it depends to a great extent on how that gesture is going to be received — which factor, unfortunately the impetuous suitor/obsessed stalker has lost all ability to gauge

Tim Kreider

Here was the plan, buy a single red rose from one of the local flower shops, get a girly card and give it to her on her birthday before school.

It’s almost like the start of a bad joke “three boys walk into a flower shop…” But that’s what we did, paid the $7 for a single flower and left. Somehow we managed to carry it back to school and home again. Then back to school the following day on my bike without crushing and killing it.

So with great nervousness I waited, and waited and waited for her to turn up to school. It seems that there is a law that states the closer you live to school, the later you are. I knew kids coming from an hour long bus ride, rocking up to school 35 minutes early. This girl lived quite close by in a near by street, but obviously had timed the journey down to the second, so she could optimise sleep or something.

She finally arrived, the awkward teenage exchange happened and I didn’t feel on top of the world, but I don’t remember feeling bad about it. But given our theme is on failure, I’m sure you can see where this is going. A few weeks later she basically told me to bugger off. To which I did, but the strange thing was a few years later we reconnected and became great friends. In the short term, it felt like I had failed. Not only had I gone from bold romantic gesture, to weird guy, but I was told to piss off and find someone else to stalk. But in the long term, I actually scored a pretty great friend. And I guess that God or the universe had other plans for me when it comes to beautiful girls, because a few years later I meet another beautiful girl, and she still puts up with me, all these years later.

Failure is the only option

Sometimes the system breaks. Today was one of those sometimes.

“The morning starts the day before” was the quote dropped by my friend Phil as I told him about my bad start to the day. Instead of bounding out of bed, I hit the “shut up you stupid alarm” button on the alarm clock and rolled over. Only to awake 10 minutes after I was meant to be at the first meeting of the day. This was a failure.

I was chatting with a group of 16 year olds today and the concept of “the oral speech” popped up. (For starters, what other kind of speech is there?) One guy had an assignment due tomorrow and all he had done was written it, he went on to say that his teacher won’t be impressed with his work, for he hadn’t prepared any cue cards. “Cue cards?!”, I replied “if you rocked up with que cards I’d probably fail you before you started”*. But another student was shocked at the idea of not having the guiding comfort of a cue cards, and expressed her horror at my comment. I went on to say “who uses cue cards in great TED talks?”

“But we aren’t professionals” was the response from the group.

I have a feeling the real issue underlying this was “we are afraid to look silly and fail”.

I heard another story today of a guy who’s left the business venture that he co-created with some others just under 6 months ago. He expressed his feeling of failure. I questioned him on how he was measuring his success or failure. At the end of the day he traded time & money for a learning opportunity. Which sounds an awful lot to me what thousands of university students do each day. Sure he didn’t come out as the next Mark Zuckerberg, but few do.

In the 2009 movie of Star Trek Kirk cheats I. commander Spocks Kobayashi Maru simulation, as Spock has designed it to show that sometimes the only way is failure.

Out of all these ideas around “failures”, it seems that the only real failure is my inability to be disciplined enough to get enough sleep. Students are unfortunately living in a space where they have to be instantly amazing at the task at hand, and don’t have the freedom to try new things and “fail” in the process. Business foke who go out on a limb, risk a little bit of money to try something new, if it doesn’t work out, but you learnt something in the process, it’s not a failure, it a learning experience.

If I could work out how to do it, I would design an assignment for students that the only way to succeed at the assignment is to break down the barriers created by other well meaning people and force the student to failure, multiple times, but through the process learn, and continue to learn how to learn, experiment & think creatively and ultimately come up on top of all the others who are too afraid to fail. Unlike Spocks simulation where the designed outcome is failure, this would have a designed outcome of success, but not in a typical linear fashion.

I hope that I have the courage to go out on a limb, take a chance & fail every once in a while.
*in hindsight that language was a little too emotive.
I think I’ll put a disclaimer on this blog alon the lines of “Most of these blog posts reflexes Andrew’s thoughts at the end of a long day. In hindsight, he only ever agrees with about 90% of what he has written/said. If any material offends you, sorry, but that’s too bad, but in retrospect and growth, some of it will offend the author, and that is ok.”