MAKER ethos on failure
A couple months ago, I posted about the need to improve the way we celebrate failure. My big beef was the lack of accountability within the word fail and the inability to distinguish between a useful failure and a f#$%-up. Still think that, but have found two expressions of failure that have boundaries, express the point of failing, and are useful.
The first one comes from Mark Frauenfelder’s Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World. Frauenfelder is a founder of boingboing and editor in chief of Make Magazine. The book covers his post-dot-boom look for a less expensive, less frivolous, more meaningful life. Three goals he and his wife set out for themselves were: 1) “take more control of our lives”; 2) “cut throught the absurd chaos of modern life and find a path that was simple, direct, and clear”; and 3)”forge a deeper connection and a more rewarding sense of involvement with the world around us.” The book’s chapter are walks through of various moments and types of DIY living, thinking and playing: how to kill your front lawn to make room for a garden; DIYing a better, cheaper source of coffee than Starbucks; making music with homemade instruments. (Sadly, no electronics.)
Anyway, the second chapter is titled “The Courage to Screw Things Up.” It’s designed to get people over the learning curve of DIY, one which is messy, costs some money, might get you an electric shock, some nasty cuts, some ruined clothes, and the occasional hole in a wall. DIY types classically take on a project that’s too big for them, muck it up, and then quit. MisterJalopy, a legendary maker (who remains anonymous), counsels that you embrace those early screw-ups, not just to get past them:
No one talks of failure as anything but shameful; this is wrong-headed and foolish. Mistakes are synonymous with learning. Failing is unavoidable. Making is a process, not an end. It is true that deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly it gives you mental tools with which to solve inevitable problems when they come up
Fraunefelder summarizes: the act of failing “is the only way to equip [yourself] with the mental toolbox of a successful DIYer”. That works for me. Fits in with the notion of failing as experimenting — failures are paths to learning more about your materials, the techniques of the craft and how they interact with environmental factors, and in taking apart a problem and putting together solutions. Dig it.
The other one comes from the Make: Electronics book. It’s a simple slogan: “Burn things out, mess things up — that’s how you learn.” Again, a call for experimenting. When you burn out a component, like an LED light, you learn about polarity (especially if it’s your last one), you learn about current, surges in electricity, resistance and capacitance. Mess things up is a nice phrase to use, since it pushes you into a ‘mixing things up’ place — the tinkerer’s idea of grabbing anything that works, taking it apart and seeing if you can’t make it work a little better or differently or just figure out what it does. Frauenfelder has a nice line about Misterjalopy:
I was charmed by his perspective of the world as a hackable platform, something to be remade and remodelled to his exacting, eccentric, yet infectiously appealing aesthetic sensibilities … In his world, the things around you should have meaning, and his way of giving them meaning is by collecting, customizing, rebuilding, and combining them in ways that make him happy.
(Mister Jalopy can be found at www.hooptyrides.com)