failure
Not too long ago I saw Zach Barf's movie where he cheats on his pregnant girlfriend. It was an ok movie, nothing bad or really good. However, there was one line that sticks with me.
"You only fail if you stop trying."
Cliche. could be a form of self-denial, but… that could also be true.
Couple days ago, I had a conversation with my manager about prototyping.
The objective of prototyping is to fail as many times as possible, as fast as possible.
It reminds me of something that I read about a tip for learning Go(a strategy board game) that a japanese master gave his student. He said that to master that game, the student needs to find 100 ways to lose as fast as he possibly could.
The reason is to learn from our mistakes and rule out possibilities. If we fail early, we wouldn't invest time in something that doesn't work.
So failure is a way to provide direction.
January 1st, 2008 at 8:19 am
The good thing about prototyping is that it allows us to test whether certain ideas are sound before we implement them on a full blown scale. If we fail during the prototyping stage, the scale of the failure is small, so very little time and money is lost. However, if we did not do prototyping, then we would have incurred huge losses in terms of time, effort and money if our ideas were not sound.