Value in Failure vs. Value in Success

[Michael Corsetto]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Interesting to see that so far, success and failure has been defined by blue banners in this thread.

Agreed.

"Fail Faster" is a motto I use often. Do you think 254 wins on the field because their team never fails? No, they just failed 100 times on their practice field, versus your 10 failures on your practice field. By the time you are at your first event, there's still 90 ways your team could fail that 254 has already identified, corrected for, and moved past.

Failure is a critical component of success. I encourage students to fail as fast as possible. Build faster, test faster, fail in the off season, fail in your prototyping, test auto until it fails, crash your scouting system, etc. Fail as often as you can when it doesn't count to increase your chance of success when it does count.

In an education culture that hinges on having the perfect grades and perfect SAT scores to get into the perfect colleges, I enjoy providing an environment where students are encouraged to test their own hypothesis, challenge their assumptions, and regularly fail. I also enjoy celebrating their victories that come from working through failure (both small and large victories).

-Mike