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On my desk I have a placard that says:

Failure is an opportunity to intelligently begin again

This is one of the principles I have built my career on. I’m certain that I have failed and lived tell about it many more times than I have celebrated sweet success.

First, it’s important to recognize that failure is okay as long as you learn something from it. Failing without learning is like paying for dinner at a fine restaurant and sending your plate back to the kitchen without eating. It’s expensive, and you miss out on the good stuff. The truth is that failing at anything can teach you lessons you just can’t get in any other way.

There is a mantra in start up companies to fail fast and fail often. This iterative idea is prevalent in business today. Agile methodology reinforces this concept and it has proven, that when applied correctly, it will get a business not only from point A to point B faster, but often point B is not the original point B envisioned, but an exponentially better one. Gradual iterations provide for more opportunities to fail and therefore more opportunities to learn, solve new problems, confirm or deny assumptions, and improve.

I have always encouraged my employees to try things and see if they work. I teach them to embrace failure and avoid paralysis by analysis.  They should not fear the unknown, but rather be excited to the possibilities that lie ahead. These concepts are not in our nature as human beings. We have primal instincts to survive and we are in conflict with this by embracing failure.

Learning from failure is such a powerful tool for us in IT. We have such a unique landscape of tools and technologies. We build and can rebuild using Agile principles and be more agile and swift than other industries. It is imperative we indeed fail, learn from failure and repeat until we get a desired outcome. I promise, if you focus on this moment in time, this single problem, and actually learn as you go, the end result will be better than you could have ever imagined in the first place.

I started out my career as a software developer, but well before that I learned some valuable lessons about what it would take to build a career in computers.

When I was 10 years old my grandmother passed away. She didn’t have a lot of money, but she loved her grandson enough to leave him two gifts. First, she left enough money for me to get to go to Disney World, because all kids should get to experience that place. Second, she left me the money to get a home computer. At that time, in the 1980’s, home computing wasn’t that common, but becoming more and more common every day.

My first computer was an Epson Equity I+ with a 5.25″ floppy disk drive, an EGA monitor, and a Panasonic dot matrix printer.  I am still kicking myself for throwing it out.  I have fond memories of my time learning on that computer.

When we got the computer unboxed and setup in a spare bedroom at our house, I remember the anticipation of what I would see. My computing experience before this was a TI-99 that my cousins and I got one year in the early 80’s that I promptly disassembled, the Atari 2600 that a friend had and the Nintendo Entertainment System that I schooled everyone on as a kid. Maybe I didn’t really school everyone on the NES, but let me have my moment. Back to my first boot. After hitting the power button, I was expecting some graphics, music, a game perhaps. What did I see?  I saw the screen flip numbers up to say 640K of RAM and then some grinding sounds and a chirp, then finally a blinking cursor at a C:\ prompt.  I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew I had work to do.

Along with my home computing system were three fat books on spiral binders. The first was how to hook up the actual hardware and information about the hardware itself. I threw that to the side, because we fumbled through that already. The second was a book about MS DOS 3.0. I thought to myself, “This might come in handy,” and set it in front of me. Finally, there was a book on programming my new computer with GW BASIC. I thought something to the effect of, “This is it!  I can actually build video games!”

I spent the next four years or so hammering away at that computer. As friends got 286, 386 and 486 computers. I still had fun making things work on my 8088 processor architecture. I built scripts to make home computing easier, and to display boot menus and such. I tinkered with simple game design. I taught the computer to make noises, play sounds and even stumble through some bad computer beep music. I built ASCII character graphics into art and learned a drawing library that taught me how to draw circles, squares, rectangles, lines and more in all 64 colors my EGA monitor could display. I built routines to print amazing HAPPY BIRTHDAY banners in many varieties of fonts, including some homegrown fonts. I acquired a modem and made my computer talk over the telephone line to my cousin’s computer just because the anticipation of waiting on the response to “Hello” was so darn thrilling. I remember getting a mouse and installing the drivers and building my first program that could accept a click.

My first computer taught me the most important lesson in my career. It isn’t the hardware you have or don’t have. It isn’t the computer programming language you choose. It isn’t the skills you possess now or the mountains of practice and research to possess new ones. Computing is simply about a can-do attitude and a relentless desire to solve the problem at hand.

As IT professionals, we are tasked with making the impossible become possible. We are tasked with building something that has never been built before. This is often on a budget and equipment and tools that are lacking in more ways than the blinking C:\ prompt I saw when I booted my first PC.

Arthur C. Clarke created three laws in the essay “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”:

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
• The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I agree, especially with the last one. I think the way I describe it is that as an IT professional it is our job and our privilege to turn fantasy into reality, fiction to fact, nothing to something, and solve problems with unbounded enthusiasm and reckless abandon.