exerian
@exerian

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.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

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.


WebsterLeone
@WebsterLeone

A lot of folks like to go "yes this applies to [x] but not the thing I want to do, [y], duh, that'd be helpful then, I'm just too stupid to do this thing!"

Not just in what people consider simple (which tend to be anything but, but that's another topic), like drawing and writing and socializing, not just stuff they consider things you need to be a professional to do like carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work, but especially so often in "technical fields".

Because of my choice of focuses I see it in particular with software and electronics development, but it can be any sort of thing that people just consider a thing that "you have to be one of those smart people that can do it and maybe have to go to college too". Still, just like anything else you can do, you have to learn to get good at it, and learning generally involves mistakes.

I bring up Simone Giertz because of her Useless Robots stuff she used to do. Literally the best way to learn a skill is to just do it, fuck up, then figure out a better way to do it. It doesn't matter that the robots didn't really do anything useful, just making a robot that could do something is a huge feat for someone that hasn't done it before, and gives you the skills to make one that does do something useful.

A personal example, of all the circuit boards I've made, the very first one was just wrong. There was no way it was ever going to work. But I didn't know that until after I did it and had to figure out why it didn't work. Even after all these years I still fuck stuff up and learn from it. The big complicated CPU card for my stereo system project? Yeah I fucked that up and I'm still trying to figure out what I did. But I've done increasingly complicated stuff between the first fuckup and the last, some of which had minor fuckups, which didn't ruin the project, but meant I wouldn't make those fuck-ups in the bigger projects.

Just do it!!


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