There are a number of quotes that relate to the theme of learning from mistakes, thinking ahead and never giving up.
“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never give in. Nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” – Winston Churchill
“A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.” – Neil Gaiman
“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” – Bill Gates
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” – Albert Einstein
A few weeks ago, at the company that I work for, I feel like we participated in our first truly successful internal hackathon. Folks had a blast, nearly everyone participated and there’s chatter already about having another. We’ve tried three before this one though. They were terrible flops. I was responsible for organizing each of them, including this most recent one. My greatest reflection of these events is the importance of feedback and perseverance.
Feedback can come in the form of any quantifiable or qualitative metric like having retrospectives, giving surveys, tallying participants, seeing social media popularity, etc. I find that it’s very similar to troubleshooting software. Try something, view results, reflect. Through trial and error and learning from mistakes can we emerge with solutions. Feedback though, is just the outcome, to make it through the trials you need perseverance.
To elaborate on the software example, perseverance is vital when you feel like you’ve tried everything but continue to trudge forward looking for a solution. Now, imagine for a second if the software problem talked back and used a lot of, ‘Nope’ dialog? That’s what it’s like to try to change a culture. I found perseverence an important trait to rely on when pushing forward with an iteration of our previous flopped hackathon.
In the end, stand up to stubbornness, be an ambassador to change and trudge through the resistance.
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