John Thurmond: A Failure Enthusiast
Channel: Electromagnetic Field
Date: 2018-09-07

https://media.ccc.de/v/emf2018-186-a-failure-enthusiast



Failure is a great teacher, but we do not often talk openly about failure in a public setting. As a scientist (and failure enthusiast), I am trying to encourage my community to talk more about failure, which is difficult since the path to success is to publish about successes and to hide failures. Let's do more to talk about failure as a Maker community. Let's be honest about the dead-ends and dumb mistakes that got us to that early prototype. Rather than ridiculing 'fails', let's instead celebrate them, since they're what we learn from and allows us to become better than we are.

Instead of teaching people that failure is bad, let's teach them how to be resilient to failure - give them a safe space to fail in, and provide them the encouragement to keep working towards success. 

As a social experiment, I will setup a slackline at EMF Camp and invite you to come and try to slackline for the first time and *livestream you failure* with the tag #EMFailure. If you want help for any reason, get in touch with me (@grajohnt).



John Thurmond