There are two basic approaches to route climbing with ropes: "Traditional Climbing" with removable gear placed as the rock allows and the potential for injury if you were to fall, and "Sport Climbing", with closely spaced fixed gear, where falling is a matter of course.
"Trad" climbers will often go years, decades, entire careers without ever falling off the rock. "Sport" climbers will average around a dozen good falls on a typical day out.
So there you have two observable groups, one where failure is not an option, the other where failure is commonplace. Given the difference in mindset, it's not surprising that you'll often see 14 year old kids with one year of experience in a world where falling is just part of the game out-climbing men with 20 years experience who've never truly exceeded their limits.
I'm not sure I totally agree with this, but I'll go with it, and expand upon it even more.
Those climbers who primarily boulder, that's climbing without a rope, fairly close to the ground, are better still. Because they work on insanely difficult problems and fall all the time.
No, he's right. Boulder falls are nearly always soft, and certainly aren't painful. Usually they're only a foot or so onto a pad. It's actually pretty rare to come off from high up and miss a pad.
Granted, you can still break things. But it still works out safer on a per-hour basis than Volleyball.
Fair comparison. 40 year climbers with 5 years experience and a willingness to push themselves to failure routinely climb harder than 40 year old climbers with 25 years experience gained climbing without falling.
Falling onto a dynamic rope is not in any way traumatic, even to an old guy like myself. The equipment really is that good. A 10 foot lead fall into space is nowhere near as demanding on the body as, say, a lay-up in Basketball.
Don't you first fall into the rope and then slam against the mountain side?
Oh, and, out of curiosity - how old are you, how long have you been climbing and what were your failures and worst injuries?
I'm asking because I am turning 30 and feel like my chance for a young and silly, careless life is slowly over.. no chance to even think about learning climbing or snowboarding or any other exciting sports.
On top of that I am an aspiring musician to I am kinda worried about my fingers and arms.
Two of the strongest climbers I know started in their late 30s. I'm 39, and I suspect my hardest routes are still ahead of me. You'll get out of it what you put in, regardless of when you start. I'd recommend taking off from work tonight and heading straight for the nearest climbing gym to give it a shot.
Oh, and one nice thing about climbing is that the better you get at it the less it hurts to fall. So sure if you fell off a beginner route with lots of ledges to hit it would certainly hurt. Fortunately you don't do that too often. Once you get past the beginner stage, routes tend to get steeper and less featured. As in, less stuff to run into when you come off.
I spent the better part of October pitching off routes on the Greek island of Kalymnos and never hit anything but air. The routes there overhang up to 45 degrees, so there's simply not anything to hit, and therefore hardly any real consequence to a fall.
It's never too late to start climbing! The goal doesn't need to be to climb extremely hard routes, but rather the ones you enjoy.
Rock climbing is a great way to get your head free (being a developer myself, I find myself thinking about project related topics all the time, and climbing and sex are the best ways for me to get my head free).
Re: crashing against the wall: that usually does not happen because you fall mostly downward and only a small bit towards the wall, which you can absorb with your feet.
I find the notion of failing as something that should be aspired to worrisome. Often the cost of failure is too high.
You don't want an airliner-pilot to seek failure. If banks make a big mistake and we slide into recession, people loose jobs, should we pat them on the shoulder for trying? What about the judge that sends an innocent man to prison? What about the solider that accidentally shoots an unarmed man? Can we assume he has learned from his mistake and will now be a better soldier? While this might be the case, the answer must be: No, we shouldn't.
Instead of postulating a culture of "fail often", we should find a higher standard. One that is based on hard work, sober and educated decision making and quality.
Furthermore it can be argued that one can learn more from success than from failure. Failure can be a byproduct of trying, but by no means it should be inverted into a measurement of success.
Let's stop this trend towards failure-ism now. I have a feeling that it might have very negative consequences.
But that airline pilot has been failing on a regular basis for years.
He learned to fly in a little single engine plane, and routinely recovered it from stalls and even spins. His instructor would have him close his eyes, then throw the plane out of balance and have him attempt to correct it by feel (and he'd often fail to do so). He's crashed that very jet you're riding in dozens or even hundreds of times in the simulator. He's even recovered a real one from a stall during his certification.
The only reason he's good enough to be trusted to fly with you in the back is because he's been training to failure all those years.
Actually he failed, we could say that he crashed the plane into the Hudson River. It's a matter of measure. If he ever do it again, he might do even better ;).
I think that we improve continuously from failure into something that looks more and more like success. Success is very relative to what you are able to accomplish at a time. If failing teach you something, might be it's a success ?
It's safer to think of success as a step in a potentially endless process. Microsoft (as an example) treated IE6 as an end, and it cost them substantial market share while they tried to catch up to the new entrant.
Thanks for your comment scrrr, and while I see where you're coming from I don't agree. You brought up airline pilots and how they shouldn't seek failure. Obviously you don't want them to seek failure while they are in the sky. But in fact they seek failure ALL THE TIME while being trained. They simulate systems malfunctions and bad weather conditions and they mess up. In the simulator. But when they face those obstacles in the air they are invariably better prepared than had they never challenged themselves in the first place in the name of success.
They seek simulated failure of the equipment to test themselves. They do not set out intending to fail in their reactions to the simulated failure. But, if they do, it's a simulator and they can start over with new lessons learned.
It is not about professional activities. I do not expect airline pilot to try new tricks fully loaded with passengers, but I appreciate Wrights brothers efforts to try to put the man in the air in the first place. If they were afraid to try, if hundreds of others who tried it before them and failed were afraid to try, we could be still dreaming about flying.
Bit it's not about innovation either. It's about pedestrian activities which one is afraid to take because of fear of failure. It could be going to play football with friends after 20 years of not playing. It could be trying to ride the first bike a kid got in front of his neighbours. It could be starting your own business. It could be anything one would like to do but his fear of failure stops him.
It's not about taking stupid risks (the airline pilot). It's about calculated risks and eliminating public failure as something one consider critically harmful. If your failure could cost you $1000 and some public exposure and it's the reason you won't try, but you would try if it'd cost you $2000 without public exposure - well, that's what this post is about. To learn to put less "value" on public exposure of your failures so that you'd stop considering it being such a big cost of potential failure.
You need to manage your risk. Without a risk management strategy, failure is likely to be worse. Obviously a pilot won't blindly seek failure to improve (I'll head for that mountain to see how well this baby handles crash landing).
'...accidently...' - A lot can learnt (and mitigated against) from accidents.
I agree it's not black and white, but I think failure is more stark and thus sticks with us, helping us to grow.
We do not expect an airline flyer to be learning how to do somersaults in air whit passengers.
The post is to be seen in the light of big corporations and individuals who are too afraid to fail and always go for the safer option which is mostly the local minima.
To be able to reach the global maxima of one's potential when you are at the peak of a local maxima, you might need to slide down and then learn to climb the higher mountain.
I don't agree with this whole glorification-of-failure stuff that is posted occasionally.
It's not that I see failure as particularly bad, or horrible. It's that it's not the point. The point is to WIN. When you launch a startup, and fail, try again. But wouldn't it have been better to succeed? Isn't the point to make money, or build a platform, or win the game? Not every product has a market. Not every customer call will result in a sale. But the point is to make a winner.
Why would you purposely seek out failure?
Of course, the undercurrent here is that in order to succeed - in order to win big - you must risk a lot, and risk failure. Risking failure is necessary. Making mistakes happens. If you're not risking failure or humiliation, you're not playing the best game you can.
Risking failure is not the same as actually failing.
Maybe that's just semantics, but it is a very important difference. If you're purposely seeking failure, I feel sorry for you.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and I see your point, and I think that all of us have the goal of winning in mind. Of course it would be better to just succeed right off the bat. But that's not realistic. Success is a process.
This post wasn't really about seeking out failure as it was about recognizing that we have limitations and taking that as a challenge to overcome them. It was also about further realizing that failure at something isn't necessarily an indictment of your ability to succeed but a sign that you are pushing yourself sufficiently that if you keep learning from your mistakes you WILL succeed eventually.
Second this. It's the same as the rejection therapy thing that started catching on. You need to be conscious of failure and unexpected outcomes but don't turn it into yet another friggin' cult movement or goal.
Set your target, go hard towards it, if you fail or come off the rails, accept it, assess it, suck it up and keep going.
All I see this doing is encouraging people to be wreckless, and not in a constructive way. Go hard, but hard enough that it's of benefit to you and your project, have some regard for the outcome that you actually want.
Last night as I was closing my laptop for the day I noticed that I had a lump in my throat and a clenched feeling in my chest.
I was lightly entertaining a passing thought about shutting down my startup.
I was thinking: "I love my startup. I put so much work and heart into it. But maybe I should shut it down."
You see, I had just finished reading a series of emails from customers telling me how unusable they thought it was. They really loved the idea, but just couldn't use it.
These were smart people, who got what we were trying to do, and yet were leaving.
And then it struck me: I was failing! That's why it's hard to breathe.
The feeling was so intolerable, and so unfamiliar (I rarely set myself in a high-probability-of-failure situation), that I didn't even know what it was.
All I knew is "This feeling must stop. At any cost"
I agree that failing isn't something to be aspired to. But I don't think that's what the OP is saying.
If I'm stretching myself, I should be feeling this more and more. And getting more comfortable with it as just part of the picture of a successful life.
I love the MJ example. This is actually what I first thought of when I read the title of the article.
The way I see it, the point is in trying, giving your best and not giving up, not in chasing failure. One should not be afraid to fail, but should always strive for success. And work on it!
* Catastrophic failures: You fail so bad that you have no option but to trash everything and start again
* Detectable / Manageable failures: You fail, but this failure is not central to your existence, so you simply try again
While there are some cases where you have no option but to risk catastrophic failures, manageable failures are something people completely miss.
Fitness / Weight training has all sorts of examples of this, the goal is to identify the limits of your abilities and to push this limit, without risking permanent damage.
Consider this: Blogger (Pyra Collab tools), Flickr (GNE), Twitter (Odeo), Nokia Phones (losses for first 15 yrs), Google (initial focus was Enterprise Search until Adwords / Adsense acquisition) were all pushing the limits, and failing, but not so spectacularly that they didn't have resources left to pivot.
Identifying the difference, and the ability to contain possibly-catastrophic errors into manageable pieces is the true art of the startup.
i was just reading about this today in "Rework", about failing in obscurity. similar notion to failing at something mundane with the M&M's. relish the opportunity you have while operating in obscurity, to fail as often as you can so you can adjust and learn and tweak and process all the data that comes with that.
also reminds me of the zuckerberg quote: "unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough." failure isn't the goal, rather a byproduct of good work.
Failing is a question of time scaling. If you look at a small piece of time or at a larger piece of time everything fail :
- Roman fail seen from today, that was a big empire
- MS is failing today
- Facebook failed sometimes and will fail one day
If you look at a micro level there is failure everywhere, bugs, stuff, missed contracts. If you fail AND are still growing indeed then it's actually a success... for the moment.
A friend of mine sent it to me a while back but I remembered it recently whilst watching the uprising in Egypt. It now hangs on the wall in my bathroom. I'm sure I've been failing unwittingly and wittingly with my new start-up:
In spite of any failure "I know the only thing I'm addicted to right now is winning" - read this inspirational and somewhat related post by Jason Baptiste from OnStartups for a great take on this now infamous Charlie Sheen quote, entrepreneurship and failure: http://bit.ly/efGLFi
The key to this post is that the candy-throwing experiment is not failure. It's training to become oblivious to public criticism, so one doesn't choke and fail in actual endeavors.
Always an interesting debate on whether you should try and fail quickly in a project etc. The faster you fail, the more m&m's you can attempt to catch in your mouth?
There are two basic approaches to route climbing with ropes: "Traditional Climbing" with removable gear placed as the rock allows and the potential for injury if you were to fall, and "Sport Climbing", with closely spaced fixed gear, where falling is a matter of course.
"Trad" climbers will often go years, decades, entire careers without ever falling off the rock. "Sport" climbers will average around a dozen good falls on a typical day out.
So there you have two observable groups, one where failure is not an option, the other where failure is commonplace. Given the difference in mindset, it's not surprising that you'll often see 14 year old kids with one year of experience in a world where falling is just part of the game out-climbing men with 20 years experience who've never truly exceeded their limits.