As failures come in threes, so do the lessons. After a week of traveling, listening, learning and speaking about my passion in video games, I’m ready to share the last of this tripartite teaching with a final story that has a happy ending.
What – you thought it was all failures, all the time? That’s not how it works. Not for me, not for you, not for anyone. There’s a third rule to failure that makes it all make sense. Read the rest of this entry »
Failures don’t wait until you’re grown up. For me, failing goes back a lot further in my history. You and I might be a bit alike; I tend to have a limited memory stack for my disappointments, but the right song, the right barometric pressure, and I start to think back to early days, to realize there are lessons still to be learned.
For me, the recent warm weather in Seattle has brought back memories of another summer - of 103-degree days, sweating away in the heat of Huntsville, Alabama; a kid in a powder-blue flight suit.
As part of Failure Week here on the blog, I’d like to tell you a story of a young pilot that trained hard, learned constantly, and failed epically – and it all came down to a switch. I was thirteen years old, in Space Camp, when I learned this important lesson about failure.
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This has been a tough birthday. Over the last week, as I approached and crossed the landing threshold of thirty years old, I got one nasty surprise after another.
Work projects, personal projects, even my cherished first book all suffered major failures within the course of a brutal seven days.
Confidentiality agreements are keeping me from spilling the juiciest gossip, but you can imagine the rejections that happen to a writer, a manager, and a games developer. I got one of each, every two days last week.
Facing up to failure has become familiar; a lot of what I’ve done in my life simply doesn’t work. The stuff I build often flames out in glorious sparks and choking smoke; that’s been my world. I’ve abandoned ideas, code, books, projects and dreams on the side of the road like blown tires shucked off an eighteen-wheeler.
There have been successes, but in terms of mindshare, I simply find failures more interesting. Success doesn’t need a blog post. I think failure does, and here, at thirty years old, I want to talk about mine.
These are personal stories that I’m couching in some rules I’ve learned; I figure there’s enough here for a few days worth of posts; I figured we’d start with my most recent, most epic failure, featuring me, arterial spray, and my breakfast.
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