What a theoretical physicist taught me about failure, what I don't know to know and bad jokes.

Failure. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but I’m not very good at dealing with it.

Just the word itself is enough to send a shiver through me. The thought of getting something wrong, missing the mark or even making a complete mess of something.

It’s not a position I want to be in. Ever.

And yet, I’m also hoping I’m not alone in this, it’s part of everyday life.

In the past 24 hours alone, I’ve managed to fail at 3 things (and they’re only the ones I’m willing to disclose); my first easy-learn-Python test (I’m guessing I can forget a future as a software engineer), putting a cat tree climber together (I apparently don’t have the patience for self-assembly) and even baking flapjacks (distracted by a work email they came out like slab of black concrete).

Now, these failures are mostly down to me possessing two not so great character traits; a lack of patience and a quite alarming ability to get distracted. My childhood was peppered with teacher’s comments of “Elizabeth, pay attention” and my father’s frustrated “you have a tete de girouette” (head like a weather vane, constantly spinning).

And whilst these failures are annoying, and yes, self-generated, they’re not the type of failures that cast a long shadow, or indeed are worthy of your time reading this today.

That's reserved for a lesson I learned from a very smart man. Possibly the smartest man I've ever known. A lesson that changed my perspective on failure forever.

A few years ago, I was with a theoretical (computational) physicist, an Assistant Professor at Imperial College, a charming man who was as engaging as he was smart. We had a little routine whereby our evening meal would consist of sharing what we’d worked on/learned that day and inevitably try and problem solve for each other. 

In fairness this was mostly one-way because my ability to add value to ‘exploring two phase flows at the micro scale’ (words that still haunt me) was pretty much nil; my added value was pretty much limited to helping him navigate academia’s politics and winning funding rounds. When I didn’t laugh at a joke about Quarternions (I had to google the term under the table) we started to pretty much focus mostly on my work.

At the time I was working on a problem that had most of our team beat. No matter how creatively we looked at the problem, how many outside sources or experts we brought in, we kept coming up short. One evening, I thought I’d had a breakthrough, thought I’d landed on the insight that would amaze our client and revolutionise their business. 

After a night spend reading, modelling and putting a detailed strategy together, I headed off to work with a bounce in my step and a smile on my face. Finally, I’d cracked it. Finally, I was earning my salary for the month. Finally, I would be able to tell my boss we were out of the woods and on our way to success. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a good start.

That evening, as I walked through the door, my bounce had given way to a slow trudge. My moment of (self-described) genius hadn’t worked out. My thinking had just raised more questions, revealed more dependencies than we had earlier imagined, highlighted more challenges and instead of taking us closer, had actually set us further back.

I flopped down onto the sofa next to the Professor and let out a loud frustrated sigh. [The cat may argue it was more of a strangled scream, but let’s go with sigh.]

As he closed his mac, he eyed me across the top of his glasses “no go?” he questioned.

“Nope. I failed. Again.” I uttered miserably, pulling at a thread on my jeans “it just made it worse. Instead of solving anything, I just highlighted even more challenges and took us even further away from the solution”

Lost in my self-pity I almost missed the look of irritation cross his face before it settled into a patient ‘I’m talking to a toddler’ expression. As I was about to question the irritation, he spoke words that stung, but forever changed my perspective on failure;

“You’re kidding me, right? You’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself for having ‘failed’ to get it right? How arrogant are you that you think you can, in one night, solve a problem that both the client, and your team have failed to solve in weeks? Where is your humility?

“And since when does getting something wrong, mean you’ve failed?  Only the idea or solution has failed, not you. Stop thinking one equals the other.

"And how can you say you are further away from the solution than you were yesterday? I’d say it’s in fact the exact opposite. You’re one significant step closer.

“Today you learned two things, you learned early to dismiss a path you could have spent a long time going down, wasting time and resources AND you learned what you didn’t know to know that is completely reframing the problem.

“You didn’t fail. You learned what you now need to consider and what can be eliminated. And if you have to frame this as failure in your mind, think of failure as the elimination of what doesn’t work. 

“You ought to think of your work, and indeed your ‘thinking’ as experiments, as hypotheses you’re testing. And as with all hypotheses, they are as likely (if not more likely) to be disproven more than they are proven. 

“But here’s the thing, if you’re smart, you learn. You learn from each iteration and elimination. You take the value from the ‘failure’ lesson and use it to inform your next attempt.

“And seriously, for someone like you, you should want to fail. If you’re only working on problems that you can solve easily, you’re wasting your brain.

“Pfft. Failure. Feeling sorry for yourself. You drive me nuts.”

And with that, he stomped off to the kitchen for what I assume was a more uplifting conversation with the cat, whilst I sat there open-mouthed, slightly stung, but realising the man had a point.

Later on at bedtime, the Prof handed me his copy of the Airman's Odyssey by Saint-Exupery with this passage highlighted:

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

12 hours later on a team call, with a guest visit by our President, I updated on the status of the project, but before I finished, decided to share my experience of the night before.

The team were all big fans of the Prof, the man they called ‘Big Brain’ after he’d come and spent a month living with me in Austin the summer before (where our team was based) and had spent many a tequila filled night deconstructing systems with some of the ex-IDEO geniuses. 

When I’d finished my tale, there was silence. For a moment I worried I’d not only revealed my moment of self-pity (never a good look) but that I’d also perhaps simply stated the bleeding obvious (also never good).

But then I watched the expression change on our President’s face and his mouth open to speak.

“The man's right. You all have permission to fail. It's expected. It's what's needed for you to to learn and get better. Great work requires it. No more wasting time trying to force what’s futile. If you can fail fast I'd appreciate it, but even if you fail slow, so long as we learn from it, we're good.”

I will add he couldn’t help ending with “and Liz, from now on give the guy a break, talk about something else at dinner”

Fast forward a couple of years and my re-entry back into the world of tech and the Prof’s words were an echo of the mindset of just about every wonderful engineer and developer genius I encountered. 

Never was this more evident to me than during a round of live Beta testing, watching the engineers be interested in, and animated about what wasn't working. Properly excited and animated. They had little interest in the bits that worked.

As one told me, it's how they learn to create 'elegant code' (the holy grail of developers); accomplishing something in much less code than most people would think possible, but in a way that's readable and obvious-in-hindsight.

For them failure isn’t just a part of life, it’s encouraged (albeit fast failure) and seen as necessary to build something great.

Reframing failure in my mind was a big moment. It changed so much that came after. It created an auto ‘so what did you learn, what will you do different next time’ question in my head that now appears in the split second I realise I’ve got something wrong.

And it also highlighted that in any given situation, there is so much 'I don't know to know'. And working from that basis makes it an adventure for the mind, and sometimes even the soul.

So, whether the moments of failure are high stakes or low, whether it's work or building cat trees, I try to visualise the wall of the Prof's office at Imperial:

Thomas Edison's words “I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that don’t work” sharpied for all eternity.