Fall in Love With the Process

Chapter 21: Fall in Love With the Process

An important part of self-discipline is learning how to respond when an attempt goes badly. If every mistake feels like a verdict on your ability, it becomes tempting to avoid difficult work. A more useful response is to ask what happened, what you can learn, and what to try next.

You can be afraid of failure and still practice consistently. The aim is to keep that fear from deciding every action. Choose a task difficult enough to reveal something about your current abilities, but manageable enough that you can attempt it and use the feedback. Progress can come from successful attempts too; failure is neither a requirement for every lesson nor a guarantee that you have learned anything.

A failure journal can help. Record what you tried, what you expected, what happened, and what you will change. Repeating the same mistake without examining it is different from testing a revised approach. The record also helps you notice whether persistence is producing improvement or merely consuming more effort.

Planning and action support each other. Gather enough information to make a sensible first attempt, then use what happens to refine the plan. In product development, a minimum viable product tests an important assumption with a limited set of features. Its value lies in what the team learns from actual use, rather than in launching something unfinished for its own sake.

Dawson illustrates the point with a story about CEOs and kindergarteners competing to build a tall Lego structure under a time limit. In the account, the children start building, discover what falls down, and revise their designs. The adults spend much of the available time discussing a plan. The lesson is to leave time to test an idea instead of using all the time to prepare. The passage does not identify a study that establishes the details of this contest.

The familiar Edison anecdote makes a similar point: the claimed 10000 unsuccessful attempts become 10000 ways that did not work, rather than evidence that the project was hopeless. Treat that number as part of the anecdote, rather than as an established count of experiments. What matters for practice is whether an unsuccessful attempt rules out an approach or suggests a better one.

Before taking a risk, consider what failure would cost and what information it could provide. A small, reversible trial can answer a question that prolonged speculation cannot. Other failures can be costly, so the sensible response may be to prepare more carefully or choose a different test. Learning from failure does not mean seeking it or dismissing its consequences.

Practice near the edge of your abilities can expose weaknesses, but the task still needs to be workable. If the difficulty is overwhelming, reduce it, get help, or break the task into parts. Children learning to walk or ride a bike offer an everyday example of repeated attempts and adjustment. Adults can use the same willingness to try again without assuming that every obstacle yields to persistence alone.

A reported success rate also needs interpretation. Hearing that only 10% of people succeed does not establish that your own chance is 10%. Nor does it establish that the other 90% simply quit at the first setback. Skills, resources, circumstances, selection into the group, and the definition of success all affect what such a figure means.

Stay committed to learning from the work, while reviewing whether the goal and method still make sense. Sometimes the next step is another attempt; sometimes it is a different approach or a decision to stop. The process is useful when it helps you make that choice with better information.