Feedback Thoughts

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"So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life." 

 This Neil Gaiman quote from the article "Make Good Art: Neil Gaiman’s Advice on the Creative Life, Adapted by Design Legend Chip Kidd" really stuck out to me. As an engineer, making mistakes is part of the process. If you are trying to solve a problem, it is virtually impossible to get a solution that works the first time. Humans just don't have the omniscience to predict every problem that will arise with your solution. Those problems can really only be detected by trying something and failing, but by trying something and seeing how it fails we learn. We understand the problem better and can create a better solution in the next iteration. For my line of work, failure is not just inevitable, it is necessary.

 But that doesn't mean it's easy. I still find myself riddled with self-doubt. The article "Seven Ways to Crush Self-Doubt in Creative Work" was rather helpful to me on this front. The central theme of this article seemed to be Give Yourself Permission to Fail. By abandoning perfectionism, embracing a growth mindset, and treating your work like an experiment, you are saying that failure is not a bad thing. It lets you learn and grow and may lead to success next time. Give yourself permission to be a fallible human, because trying to never make a mistake often leads to never doing anything, for fear of making a mistake, but also to never doing anything, let alone doing anything well. So go, be reckless, try things, fail, succeed, learn.
It is easier to correct course than to start moving.
(Source)

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