Failing cheaply to grand success
#137 - an 11-week term comes to a Christmas close
Hi there,
And so, it’s the end of term. I have discovered time has a very unique property when considered as a period during which an experience happens: it feels simultaneously short and long.
“Where did the time go?” The feeling that time went by very quickly, which makes you want to say “It feels like yesterday when I started __.”
“So much has happened”. Equally, giving it a second to recall/remind yourself of all that you’ve done (for me, this was a Photos slideshow on the way home) highlights how much you fit into that period.
I am now home, with 20 days of relaxation and revision - with 4 exams waiting for me on my London return. It’s been another busy Christmassy week, ahead of lots of music to start the week ahead.
Highlight of the week: my Friday in London. A total of 27k steps barely quantifies how much I covered with friends, the city centre inundated with Christmas lights, people and cold winds. It was great to enjoy the frolics of Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland too.
As you can probably tell, I have leapt into the Christmas spirit this year, for reasons insignificant. One such experience was going to Kew Gardens, a botanical garden in West London, which puts on a wonderful Christmas lights display.
Luckily, my accommodation was able to get subsidised tickets of £12, as opposed to the £28 general public price - a steal. I did have a relatively busy week nevertheless so there was a decision to be made.
My reasoning? It’s the only chance I’ll get to go at this low a price. If I like it, awesome - I know of another out-of-the-woods thing to do in London at Christmas. If I don’t, it’s the cheapest chance I’ll get to find that out. In the end, it was a wonderful evening out.
This mindset is known in entrepreneurship circles as the ‘fail fast’ mindset - make it easy and low-stakes to experiment and run through multiple iterations to reflect, learn and make it better. A couple of ways I see this in my life:
1. The upside behind Too Good to Go: this is an (incredible) app which allows you to buy soon-to-expire food at discounted prices, making food affordable and reducing waste.
The motivation for stores is that they ultimately make more revenue compared to throwing the food out. Furthermore, if a user likes the food, atmosphere or staff at the cafe/restaurant they picked food up from, TGTG could generate a new customer.
From the customer’s point of view, however, this is a great way to discover new places you wouldn’t visit, giving yourself more options of places to go and expanding your food tastes, all at a low price.
2. The low weighting for Year 1 grades: it is mostly common for universities to add low-to-no significance to your first year performance, with regards to the final degree classification.
What does this mean? Year 1 is the time to learn and not be penalised for it - learning how to study your subject, now at university level, learning how to balance your social life and studies and learning how to use your independence well among others.
3. Leadership positions at school: I remember thinking about this during my school captaincy, but it makes even more sense now. Picking up opportunities to work in a team and/or lead at school is the best training ground you’ll get for developing all the vital skills for life beyond (communication, collaboration, resilience and the like).
Why? The material big-picture cost of failing is negligible - so what if one of the Y10 house events didn’t go to plan? There’s always next time, during which you can do better by learning from the previous one.
The point of failing fast is to work out the ‘unknown unknowns’ as soon as possible, thereby increasing your chances of not failing on the next attempt. Eventually, avoiding failures from all these causes will lead to success. This takes time but failing fast tries to reduce that timeline - you’ve discovered 1 fewer booby trap.
I never once failed at making a light bulb. I just found out 99 ways not to make one. Thomas Edison
2 final points to think about:
Can you find a domain to try new things easily and improve through failures? As Naval Ravikant would say, the cost of technology is close to nothing, so anything digital - coding, videos, podcasting, blogging - works well here. For me, this is going to be reaching out to people, intending to make more out of being in London next term.
Is this an approach to embed into your New Year’s resolutions? With just 2 weeks to go to New Year’s, your subconscious will be thinking about what needs changing for next year. Perhaps you should make the cost of commitment low (unless you want to as motivation) to allow yourself to improve faster?
As explored many times on The Sun’s Out (here’s a link that shows you all of them!), failure is desirable, it is the fuel to growth. Therefore, like a spoon of protein powder, a shot of caffeine or a Lucozade, why not catalyse growth by supercharging your pursuit at the start? The start of a journey is often when the stakes are lowest - the product isn’t as big yet - which makes it the easiest to change direction to success.
Podcast of the week🎙️
BBC Newscast - Is The NHS Facing a ‘Quad-Demic’?
Love this show: Adam Fleming is a great host, the content is very digestible and this episode here was another injection into consciousness (pun intended, but terribly mixed up) of the dire state of our NHS.
What I’m grateful for this week 🙏
The Avanti West Coast employee who let me get on the next train, because I juuust missed the previous one
Quote of the week 💬
Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others. Plato
Looking forward to going to my first ever Vesey concert as a pure audience member, and can’t wait to see everyone to hear about their Autumn Terms!
Adi