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Failure: The Blog  

August 2018

  • When This Executive Was Fired, He Took Charge
  • Obeying The Speed Limit Has Never Been More Fun
  • London Black Cabs Helped Uber Grow
  • Bette Graham Created A Product To Fix Her Mistakes
  • Flamin' Hot Cheetos Had An Interesting Start

July 2018

  • Fear This Instead Of Failure
  • Re-Releasing Songs Created Success
  • A CEO's Purposeful Mistake
  • The Tardy Student And The Unsolvable Problem
  • Fixing Potholes Through Graffiti

June 2018

  • A Surprising Mistake In The Oxford English Dictionary
  • US Army Embraces Mistakes
  • Blocking A Hymn
  • Eddie Shore Was Truly A Tough Guy
  • [Video] Elon Musk Didn't "Pivot" He Failed

May 2018

  • 8 Examples of Mental Toughness Part 2
  • Necessity Turned Accessory: Allen Iverson's Sleeve
  • This Doctor Has Continued To Fail
  • 8 Examples of Mental Toughness
  • MIT Accidentally Creates New Smelting Process

April 2018

  • Johnny Cash Quit Singing Lessons
  • Cruise Control Came Out of Frustration
  • Time Spent Gaming Pays Off In The Navy
  • Rock Around The Clock Was a Commercial Failure
  • Sigmund Freud Should Have Been Discouraged

March 2018

  • Superman Couldn't Fly
  • This School Shares Failures
  • Jim Croce's Parents Hoped He Would Fail

[More archives...]

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The Scope of Your Failure

July 15th, 2010 - by Robby Slaughter

We all make tons of mistakes. Understanding the scope of our error, however, doesn’t require a soul-searching admission of imperfection. Instead, we just need a little arithmetic.

Before we get a more detailed study of failure, however, let’s talk about another problem for the ages: how many fish are there in the sea? This is the kind of question that is extremely impractical to answer, mostly because the sea is very large and fluid and the size of private research funds devoted to such analysis is quite small. So how do you figure it out?

Photo © pacificaqua.org

One way is to use the Lincoln-Petersen method, which consists of three simple steps:

  1. Capture some fish
  2. Mark all of those fish, and release them
  3. Capture some more fish, noting if any are being recaptured.

If you think about it for a moment, this approach gives a powerful indicator of the total size of the population. For example, if all of the recaptured fish are marked, you have pretty much accounted for all the aquatic life. But if you don’t find a single marked fish, then the total number of fish must be far bigger than the amount you have been catching.

The capture-mark-recapture strategy is fantastic because it uses two independent assessments: the first capture and the second capture. It’s not only used by marine biologists, but scientists working with all kinds of plants and animals. It’s even a great tool for studying the spread of epidemics, the movement of money through a financial system, or the spread of an oil spill.

But anyway, back to making mistakes. How can we use Lincoln-Petersen for figuring out how we screwed up? Consider something prone to having lots errors, like a book on failure. What’s the best way to determine the number of typos in a manuscript?

That’s easy: have two seperate copyeditors review the same version of the document, and see which errors they find. Mistakes that both reviewers uncover are like marked fish. They’ve been captured and recaptured. Screwups that only one reviewer finds are more serious. If something escapes the nets of two distinct professionals, more work remains to be done.

We must fail in order to succeed. We would never think the ocean was empty after an unsuccessful fishing expedition, but we might think we’ve found all the errors in our work after one focused session of careful review. Instead, we should expect to fail. We should independent sources to look for errors and use this data to decide what we need to do next. Failure is the secret to success!

For some fascinating background, see the Bit Player blog.

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