Failing Faster

Working with the digital summer clinic has introduced me to the concept of "failing faster". I kind of can't believe I've lived this long and never heard of it but the concept is essentially: if you are trying to do a new thing or learn a new skill, just do it. Yes, you'll probably fail but you will learn things that can help you in your next attempt and hopefully get past the daunting feeling of Starting Something New(TM?).

My initial response was pretty lukewarm. Why would you start something before you know how to do it? Before you've taken notes, reviewed, planned, and fully prepared? I mentioned in my previous post that I'm taking an accounting class this summer and every time I have an exam I take it on the last available day. This is (mostly) not because I'm procrastinating but because I consistently feel that I should use as much of the time available to me as I can to review, study, and memorize as much content as I can. While this might be a perfectly acceptable approach to something like an exam, where you only get one shot, it can have a crippling effect when you have a more fluid goal without a concrete timeline.

One of our clinic requirements is to gain a new certification before the end of the clinic. Like many other interns, I'm working on the Google Analytics certification. Our clinic mentors insist that we just try the exam by the end of week four, even though we don't need to achieve the certification until the end of the 8th week. Left to my own devices, this is probably about the time when I would have started reviewing the content, taking notes, color-coding them with highlighters, and making myself review sheets to memorize. I probably wouldn't even consider taking a test I knew I would fail, even though the stakes are pretty low (it can be retaken in a day or two).

So today, a whopping four days before the deadline, I took the certification test. I wasn't ready. And guess what? I failed! I got a 54% which is not a score I'd usually be happy with. But as I reflect on the "fail faster" process, I see the wisdom. I now know what kinds of questions and topics to expect and I realized that I had at least some existing knowledge. While I certainly won't be winging it in grad school anytime soon, I will certainly pursue many more technical certifications and skills throughout my career and I think I would take this same approach again.

tl;dr: don't let the desire to be perfect keep you from being good!

(I'm pretty sure Voltaire said this, but it kind of works here, right?)