Does failure lead to success?

[The Spin Doctor]

Samual Beckett, the Irish novelist said:

"Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

It's a great soundbite. The trouble is, he was absolutely and completely wrong.

Failure DOES matter. If we simply keep trying and failing, our confidence will plummet because we NEED to see success to know we're on the right path. Continued failure betrays ignorance of the solution.

Even 'failing better' isn't a goal we should aspire to - we need successes, even if they are small ones. And that why the expression 'practice makes perfect' is also wrong. It won't, if we don't know what we should be practicing. We need to 'practice the perfect' and that way we make it permanent - that behavioural shift I was talking about.

Repeated failure really IS a place to avoid. Trust me, as a trainer it's far more difficult to fix a confidence issue brought about by repeated failure than it is to fix the knowledge gap or build the right skill in the first place.

So here are the take-aways if you detect the beginnings of a confidence issue.

DON'T keep banging your head against the wall by doing the same thing and failing - it's not character-forming, it builds mental walls.

DO get help and quickly - it's not a sign of weakness, but a smart response to a problem.

Get TRUSTWORTHY help - it doesn't have to be professional - though there are people like me only too willing to assist - because there are all sorts of people out there with advice. Just remember - whilst nearly all of it is well-intentioned, not all of it is accurate so you do have to be a bit careful picking what's trustworthy from the occasional piece of dross.

DON'T be embarrassed - the only stupid question is the one that doesn't get asked.

www.survivalskillsridertraining.co.uk

[dern]

I'm not suggesting training isn't beneficial but your post (with respect) makes little sense to me. We learn literally everything through trying, failing and continuing to find different ways to succeed until we achieve the goal we set out to learn. Practice does make perfect, of course it does, anything else is counter intuitive and counter to everyone's experience. What doesn't work is trying the same thing twice and expecting different results. Getting help is faster and will potentially help you steer round the possible outcomes that are undesirable but to say the quote is wrong is wrong. Repeated failure is inevitable unless you choose something utterly trivial to master and is the way we learn.

[Horse]

We learn literally everything through trying, failing and continuing to find different ways to succeed until we achieve the goal we set out to learn.

Get an overtake badly wrong and you might not be in any state to learn from it.

[Count Steer]

I'm not suggesting training isn't beneficial but your post (with respect) makes little sense to me. We learn literally everything through trying, failing and continuing to find different ways to succeed until we achieve the goal we set out to learn. Practice does make perfect, of course it does, anything else is counter intuitive and counter to everyone's experience. What doesn't work is trying the same thing twice and expecting different results. Getting help is faster and will potentially help you steer round the possible outcomes that are undesirable but to say the quote is wrong is wrong. Repeated failure is inevitable unless you choose something utterly trivial to master and is the way we learn.

I hope you aren't a surgeon.

[Horse]

Repeated failure is inevitable unless you choose something utterly trivial to master and is the way we learn.

I hope you aren't a surgeon.

Or a free-fall parachutist

[dern]

These examples of people aren’t born good at these things, they practice. Just not in some circumstance where someone might die.

[Horse]

These examples of people aren’t born good at these things, they practice. Just not in some circumstance where someone might die.

Have you never heard the medical 'expression', "Watch one, do one, teach one"?

Training (as long as it's good training) provides a short-cut, learning from others' mistakes.

Do you think that any Darwin Award winners ever thought "Well, I won't survive this but, hey, someone might learn from it." People make choices and decisions typically based on what they thought, at that moment, was 'best' or 'a good idea'. It's only hindsight that allows that to be decided. Many riders won't or can't do that self-reflection.

where someone might die.

Like the rider?

[dern]

Right, sure but I'm not disagreeing with the benefits of training, I agree with you on that. However, the original premise was that "Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." was wrong is oncorrect in my opinion. Training is trying, failing and trying again. Regardless of whether we are taught by someone else or we attempt to teach ourselves we are still trying over and over again.

When I did my IAM supervised runs I was following the advice given to me and repeatedly attempting to apply it until I was successful enough at all the points covered to pass the assessment. In other words I tried, failed (wouldn't have reached the level required), tried again and so on until I was good enough to pass.

[Horse]

However, the original premise was that "Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." was wrong is oncorrect in my opinion.

But the point Spin was making [AIUI] was about not learning:

DON'T keep banging your head against the wall by doing the same thing and failing

Training is trying, failing and trying again. Regardless of whether we are taught by someone else or we attempt to teach ourselves we are still trying over and over again.

When I did my IAM supervised runs I was following the advice given to me and repeatedly attempting to apply it

There's the difference.

If self-improvement was always the way, you wouldn't have needed the IAM, you would already have worked it out for yourself (caveat: any safety or 'better' stuff. If it's IAM test-specific content, then you would need support and insider information)

Previously, I said 'good' training.

Rarely have I seen any training [of any type] where learners are set up to initially fail, although there might be a case for doing it to demonstrate issues with understanding or as part of formative assessment.

But it would have to be planned to ensure failing safely. Is that what your Observers did?

When I plan training it is usually to do two things:
- trainee gets it right
- trainee understands how it can go wrong, so they could take action to 'fail safely'*

* Edit
Example:
Teaching throttle & clutch control for pulling away; you need to cover 'how to stop' for someone who can't ride, isn't used to the controls.

[iansoady]

"There's no success like failure and failure's no success at all" as Mr Dylan said.

[Horse]

And in a great coincidence, this (from 2016) was mentioned today on LinkedIn:

https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/cong ... lucky-f-er

[slowsider]

And in a great coincidence, this (from 2016) was mentioned today on LinkedIn:

https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/cong ... lucky-f-er

I'll pull this quote from your link, and relate to the OP:
"When we see the results, we see the tip of the iceberg, the top 10%, we don't see the 90% of blood, tears, effort, frustration and failure. "

When Beckett says 'fail better', the intended outcome is not a better failure; the key phrase is 'try again', with a view to improving. If we dont try again, we never improve.

[Horse]

And in a great coincidence, this (from 2016) was mentioned today on LinkedIn:

https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/cong ... lucky-f-er

I'll pull this quote from your link, and relate to the OP:
"When we see the results, we see the tip of the iceberg, the top 10%, we don't see the 90% of blood, tears, effort, frustration and failure. "

When Beckett says 'fail better', the intended outcome is not a better failure; the key phrase is 'try again', with a view to improving. If we dont try again, we never improve. If we don't reflect on our failure, identify flaws in our planning and execution then we may well fail again (we might succeed, but not know why or how). If we die in the failure, we don't get the opportunity to try again.

Expanded a bit for you

After all, you did include 'blood' in your quote.

[slowsider]

Blood. Waiting for Godot?


Beckett wasnt writing about skills acquisition anyway.

[Horse]

Waiting for Godot?

Nope, I'm waiting for Spin to come back and fight his corner

[1913]

Not if you are russia.

[demographic]

I reckon that science is based on keeping track of failures and incrementally improving next time.
So yeah, some failures do lead to success, depends on what yer measuring dunnit.

[The Spin Doctor]

I'm not suggesting training isn't beneficial but your post (with respect) makes little sense to me. We learn literally everything through trying, failing and continuing to find different ways to succeed.

And we learn nothing from trying, failing and continuing to find the same ways to fail.

Read the post again. I'm not talking about trying something out, analysing the results and thereby finding a better way to do something. Absolutely that's how we learn and it's something I talk about all the time in my posts.

What I'm talking about are the people who ride into a dead end from which they can't find their way out.

There are plenty of riders out there with issues they can't fix.

Years ago in the old Compuserve days - which put it about 1995! - I recall someone writing a post about a collision he'd had with another vehicle... he told the sorry tale in the first person, in the present tense. It was an effective device for recounting the crash as he saw it.

The shocker - of which he DIDN'T see the significance - was his very first sentence. "Here we go again."

The implication - and the fact that became clear as he looked for explanations at the end of the post - was that he'd been in EXACTLY the same situation before. And not just once, either. He was recounting his THIRD near-identical collision. His solution? He was seriously considering giving up biking.

That's what I am talking about.

Clearer now?

Got people talking, anyway

[The Spin Doctor]

When Beckett says 'fail better', the intended outcome is not a better failure; the key phrase is 'try again', with a view to improving. If we dont try again, we never improve.

Correction. If we don't try again, we CANNOT improve.

But the point I'm making is that if you don't know WHAT needs improving after a failure, WHY it needs improving and HOW to improve, you WILL fail again and in exactly the same way.

As I've said, we DO learn from experience, but we have to be analytical enough (whether we realise that's what we're doing or not) to have some idea of which way success lies. Simply doing the same thing again DOESN'T lead to improvement. That's why the 'practice makes perfect' saying is wrong.

[The Spin Doctor]

I reckon that science is based on keeping track of failures and incrementally improving next time.
So yeah, some failures do lead to success, depends on what yer measuring dunnit.

Testing to failure then do it better next time is engineering

Science is figuring out where, why and how it will fail so you do it right first time!!

(Says me with a scientific background)