you cannot grow if you do not make mistakes. This is, basically, an iron law.
the difference between an amateur and a professional is the professional has made the mistake enough times to know how to either avoid it or fix it.
I cannot stress this enough:
If you can find a way to make your mistakes in a relatively safe and controlled way, you are training yourself to be able perform similar actions correctly under stress, when there's real things on the line.
Failure teaches you that some part of your approach didn't work. Failure teaches you about your assumptions. Failure gives you information. Failure is data. But only if you build the habit of listening to it.
one of the most useful properties of failure, if you think about it really hard, is that you're performing a bisection search every time you do it. The solution isn't the combination of the things you just tried, not under these conditions.
It's called Failed It!: How to Turn Mistakes Into Ideas and Other Advice for Successfully Screwing Up.
The book provides many examples of how mistakes and failure can be interesting and exciting, and how perfection can paradoxically be bland and uninteresting. By the way, it's not printed right-to-left; the cover is backward.
