You know what’s brilliant?

Getting stuff wrong.

As odd of a statement as that might seem, I think it is pretty great to have a nice long list of failures. Virtually everything new I get into eventually results in a terrible, painful, and often funny to look at failure, but that just means things are just the beginning. I would not rather take all of my failures and make them be reshaped into successes; That simply takes all of the fun out of things.

Failing and failing hard is just a sign that the initial legwork to do something is in progress and at this point I’m too stubborn to let horrible mistakes prevent me from doing things again. Don’t get me wrong, I’m unlikely to redo things exactly as I did them before because I know have data that says that the ideas were bad and if I’m lucky I’ll have some data on how exactly they were bad.

Time and motivation are the limiting factors here, so failing with a spectacular fireball is almost always preferable (assuming it isn’t a real fire). This seals off the bad ideas rapidly and it tends to keep things entertaining. So here’s to another year of terrible mistakes, trying new wrong things, and hilarious failure.