This book is for informational purposes only. Except when an external source is cited, everything in the book is the author’s opinion. The author makes no guarantee about the correctness or accuracy of any content in this book. Furthermore, you may disagree with and/or find certain content offensive.
Read at your own risk. Do not continue reading if you do not accept full responsibility for all actions you take as a result of reading this book. The author is not liable for any damages including, but not limited to, academic failures, career path mistakes, financial loss, feeling upset, and physical/mental injury.
Although you set yourself up for success by managing your life and interactions well, things inevitably go wrong and you will face failure in your lifetime — possibly major, catastrophic failures. We underestimate things, we make mistakes, and sometimes unforeseen factors outside our control ruin our plans. How you deal with failure determines how much you learn and grow. Two important concepts are
While you can’t predict the unpredictable, these techniques help you avoid repeating mistakes.
Did your parents teach you to look both ways before you cross a street? Hopefully they did because that’s an important act of preparation. By looking both ways before crossing, you are guarding against failure: when you don’t see a car and it hits you.
Setting goals and analyzing transactions is all great planning for your future interactions, but you still need to prepare for the actual interactions. Prepare for your morning class by packing your backpack the night before with everything you need. Prepare for your upcoming exam by studying for several weeks in advance. Prepare for the job interview by rehearsing your responses in advance. Even prepare for something as simple as cooking dinner by checking that your fridge has all the ingredients you need. By preparing, you reduce your chances of being caught with your pants down by something unexpected.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Let’s go over an example of how lack of preparation can spiral into a catastrophic failure.
Ian has an exam on Monday. He has a plan in place: he will play some video games with his friend first from noon until 8:30pm. Then run home and finish dinner by 9pm. He will study until 11pm, and then go to sleep to be well-rested for his 9am exam on Monday.
Ian skips his Sunday grocery run because he is too engaged in video games at his friend’s place. He tells himself he’s pretty sure he has leftovers in his fridge. When he gets home starving at 9pm, he finds his fridge is actually empty — he forgot that his girlfriend came over on Saturday and they finished all the food. Ian panics and orders takeout from the one restaurant that’s still open, and it takes until 10:30pm to get the food delivered. By then, hunger has prevented him from focusing on studying for his 9am exam on Monday.
Ian starts studying after he finishes dinner at 11pm. It’s past his normal bedtime and he’s feeling tired because he was supposed to start studying two hours earlier. Nevertheless, he pushes through and finishes by 2am. Unfortunately, Ian passes out and forgets to set his alarm clock. He wakes up at 9:30am and realizes he overslept. He runs to the exam room, arrives at 9:45, and has lost half his time on the test. He gets a 63% because he couldn’t get through all the problems, and now his final grade is in jeopardy.
Despite having a plan in place, Ian made irresponsible preparation choices. First, he didn’t prepare for his exam earlier in the week. He left zero breathing room for anything unexpected. Second, he didn’t prepare for his dinner. Had he simply opened his fridge on Sunday to confirm there was food left, he would’ve realized he needed to get groceries. Ultimately a combination of poor decisions culminated in Ian forgetting to set his alarm and oversleeping for his exam; had he done something as simple as confirming his dinner plans by checking the fridge on Sunday morning, he would have avoided disaster. We can only hope Ian learns from his mistakes.
Suppose you never look both ways before crossing a street and you actually get hit by a car. If you survive, presumably you’ll always look both ways when crossing a street in the future. That’s the “postmortem” step: you learn from failures and add in new preparation steps so that you don't repeat the mistake again.
Nobody is perfect and failure is destined to slip through cracks in your preparation. Once you realize failure has occurred, identify the crack and patch it up so you don’t repeat the failure again.
Ian feels sad after getting a 63% on his exam. The worst part is knowing that had he arrived on time, he would’ve scored at least a 90%. Although the questions were time consuming, the solutions were straightforward. In fact, the class average is 87%, which means Ian doesn’t get any benefit from a curve.
Eventually, Ian realizes there’s no point in moping over his failure — feeling sad isn’t going to change his grade. He resolves to never make the same mistake again. Ian understands that he didn’t plan out his day correctly; he didn’t focus on preparing for the things that mattered. He should not have prioritized video games because that caused him to forget about dinner, which spiraled into oversleeping for the exam. Ian tells himself that in the future, he will finish all his work and errands first before going over to his friend’s place to play video games again.
Ian chooses the middle ground in terms of responses to his failure. He could have taken a variety of actions to prevent his failure from happening again. Some possibilities include
Some actions are more drastic than others, and it is important to find the right level of severity: too low and you don’t address the root cause of the failure, too high and you end up with an impractical solution.
The first two options are weak responses. Although storing extra meals ensures Ian will never be too hungry to study, what if he forgets to do laundry and has to stay up an extra three hours waiting for it to finish? Although keeping a permanent alarm for 8AM ensures Ian will never oversleep, what if he forgets to charge his phone and it runs out of battery? These solutions don’t address the root of the problem: that Ian takes an irresponsible approach to playing video games, which causes him to not prepare for other critical tasks.
The last two options are overly-strong responses. Although quitting video games will ensure Ian doesn’t take an irresponsible approach to video games, his happiness will decline significantly when he gives them up completely. Similarly, ending his friendship with his video game friend will probably hurt Ian’s general happiness, not to mention get him labeled by everyone as “crazy.” Overly-strong solutions address the root of the problem, but are cruel and unusual punishments.
The third option of finishing work and chores before playing video games is an excellent middle ground. It prevents Ian from inappropriately prioritizing video games without forcing him to give up gaming. Once you find the middle ground, you can reinforce your preparation step. In Ian’s case, this would be finishing his studying first so that he is appropriately prepared for upcoming exams before he goes off to have fun with his video games.
Although Ian’s incident is short-term and only makes a small dent on his academic record, the same logic also applies to larger failures with a long-term impact. No matter how much you prepare, you’ll have unknowns — you simply can’t foresee everything that might happen over the next month or year. Accept your failures and learn from them by making adjustments to detect mistakes sooner. Don’t expect to eliminate all failure; instead aim to fail faster.
A common mistake is spending months or years pursuing the wrong software career path. Back in chapter 5, we discussed all the research and preparation Felicia did before deciding to pursue mobile app development. Suppose Felicia spends a year taking the coursework she planned and then realizes mobile app development is not for her. At this point, she has committed a year to the wrong software career path and “failed.” Her postmortem step should involve understanding why mobile app development wasn’t a good choice:
Whatever the reason(s), she should take them into consideration for the future. For example, if she decides she doesn’t enjoy building user interfaces, then she should avoid any related courses.
Furthermore, Felicia’s postmortem step should involve understanding why she didn’t fail sooner. Did she
Felicia should adjust her preparation to identify similar failures sooner. For example, if sampling an online, mobile-app-development course would’ve highlighted her dislike for building user interfaces, then she would have identified the issue before spending a year on formal coursework through her college. In the future, Felicia should then sample free online courses to fail fast if she commits to a wrong career path.
Even if you do your due diligence by setting goals and analyzing transactions, you can still fail. Nobody is perfect and something is bound to slip by eventually and derail your plans. You can’t predict the future, but you can reduce the chances of failure by preparing adequately. If failure does slip past your guard, analyze what went wrong and come up with corrective actions to adjust your preparation so that similar failures are less-likely to happen again. If they do reoccur, you can fail faster and readjust. Each time you encounter failure, you discover a flaw with your process. With each failure-postmortem cycle, you patch the flaws in your goal-setting and transaction-analysis methodology to grow stronger.