Seek to Misconstrue + a
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
Roundoff Error: Failure and Success
We often use approximations like: “It’s about thirty degrees outside.” But an article explains how roundoff error can actually be devastating as well as the foundation for future success.
An entry in Wolfram MathWorld includes the following:
An egregious example of roundoff error is provided by a short-lived index devised at the Vancouver stock exchange. At its inception in 1982, the index was given a value of 1000.000. After 22 months of recomputing the index and truncating to three decimal places at each change in market value, the index stood at 524.881, despite the fact that its “true” value should have been 1009.811.
Photo © blog.fundx.com
People who invested in that index fund must have been pretty upset that half of their money had vanished due to an arithmetic mistake! And in fact, the Vancouver Stock Exchange corrected the price in only one day. They also determined they needed a more comprehensive process for designing and reviewing index funds.
Failure is the secret to success. We sometimes need to make tremendous mistakes to realize how to get better. Sometimes, those errors are something as small as a rounding error, but they add up over time. They help us realize how we can and should improve.
