Apprenticeship Patterns Blog – Learn How you Fail

For this week’s blog post, I read the section “Learn How You Fail” from chapter five of the book Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. The quote beginning of the section is what stood out to me the most. It says, “Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change.” The section talked about how sooner or later you may face failures but the right thing to do is push forward at the boundaries and learn to overlook the mistakes you have faced. In our field, we face many failures but that is not holding us back to accomplish the goals we have set for ourselves. The author mainly talked about becoming conscious of the things that trip you but allow yourself the choice of working to fix the problems that are cutting the losses.

One of the most important things to do when you face failure is to accept it and investment of time and effort to make a small improvement. Allow yourself some time and the “goal is to gain self-knowledge about the patterns, conditions, habits, and behaviors that lead you to failure.” I liked the example the author provided regarding Ade. Ade keeps a set of private wikis listing all his current skill set and limitations, this enables him to pick challenges to push outwards and to stop wasting effort on the wrong things which can lead to failures. This is a great example of something that I need to do for myself. Especially keeping a diary or a blog is helpful as I mentioned in the previous blog post that talked about the “Record What You Learn” apprenticeship pattern. This pattern was very true to me. Leaning from failures is important and you cannot excel at everything but accepting these limitations and learning from the failures or mistakes forces you to acknowledge them and focus on improving them so you do not make the same mistakes again.