I am sure that at some point in our lives we have all encountered failure and at this point, it may have felt that it was the worst thing that could happen. Now I don’t wish to get into the discussion about what type of failure is best, but from my perspective, I have been using this for the last few months to determine the best course of action for me to learn and how I can integrate failure to deepen learning.

To provide some context, there are often two approaches to learning which are first we understand the theory of the subject and then do the practical exercises as we progress. The second is to jump in straight away and fumble our way around and then when we hit a roadblock go and look at the theory to understand it deeper.

When I reflect on how I have learnt in the past I have used both of the aforementioned approaches and I find that the best approach for me is to quickly scan all the content (1 - 2 seconds per page) and tag any pages that catch my interest for review later and then at the end of that attempt to do the subject and go from there.

NOTE: I am not suggesting that if you want to learn something like sky-diving that you watch a YouTube video and go and jump out of a plane, please exercise common sense and ensure that the safety of yourself and others is first and foremost.

Skydiving

In the last month, I have undertaken this on two very different subject areas with the first being to learn about Software Defined Radio (SDR) Hacking and the second is cooking poached eggs.

Two very different fields, but I have found that the approach has worked well when starting with learning to cook the perfect poached egg, I watched a couple of videos and then jumped straight into it. For anyone that has tried this, professional chefs make it look super easy and I went through several variations from using white vinegar to different size pans, stirring speeds, temperature, types, freshness and temperatures of eggs, and the list goes on. My first attempt was edible and luckily so have all the subsequent ones (to varying degrees of course) but each of these small failures, generated a series of questions about what went wrong, why did that happen, and what could I do to correct that etc. Today I finally made restaurant quality look, texture and taste and I am over the moon.

Now how does this work on a deeper subject that requires a high level of technical skills and subject knowledge? Very similar to be honest. I quickly looked through the content and understood the basic premise but as I started going through them I was coming up with a lot of questions and then I encountered a problem and had to start researching what happened, why did it happen and that made me persist even harder and want to understand the subject material even deeper that made the theory part of the subject much more interesting.

Through experiencing failure which is integral to the learning process, it improves information recall, critical thinking and a deeper sense of determination and persistence that will build self-esteem. Failure is a fantastic opportunity for us to grow and instead of looking at it as a negative, we should appreciate the growth opportunities that it provides us and integrate it into our learning and appreciate the lessons that it is teaching us.