Lights, Camera, Action!

The scene is set, everyone is at their positions, knows what they have to do, knows their lines and then a blooper happens. What happens next? Take 2.

I know what you're thinking, what does this have to do with anything? When we work on something we expect to do everything right from the beginning. Instead of starting and acting, we spend endless hours planning in order to avoid any mistake or failure.

What's the alternative? Start, act, try new things. If you fail, that's no problem. Try again. Each time you will become better and stronger. Don't expect to get it right from the beginning, there are many things to learn and the best way to learn them is by acting and learning from your mistakes.

Posted by Harry Mylonadis 

Reflect

Failing and making mistakes is not enough in order to learn and become better. You also need to dedicate time on reflecting on what has happened and why it didn't work.

Here's where a problem lies. When most people reflect on bad experiences, their feelings resurface. There's anger, anxiety, stress, fear, tears and emptiness. In order for the reflection to work and make you better you need to turn these feelings around.

Examine the past experiences without passing judgement and feeling bad. Things happen for a reason and by reflecting positively on the past you learn and expand your brain capacity. You can even create new pathways in your brain and start feeling better. Think of what could have gone worse or how your failure protected you from things getting worse.

As always, for this to work you need to turn it into a practice. Try to at least dedicate an hour once a week reflecting on past experiences. Turning the bad ones into good ones and learning from them. You will then gradually start feeling better and facing problems with a more positive attitude.

Posted by Harry Mylonadis 

Don't Let it Get You Down

Failing is tough. No matter how many times you fail, each one will have the same soul-crashing effect. The important thing is what you do afterwards. You need to learn to not let it get you down.

Fail, learn from your mistakes and move on. Do more work, try again, fail, until you have reached success. Don't listen to the bad things people might have to say and don't change the core of what you are trying to do. You know why you are doing it, it's just not ready yet.

I was amazed to read last week that Tim Westergren from Pandora was rejected 300 times by VCs when looking for funding after the dot-com crash. That's not a typo, it was 300 times! I'm sure the last rejection hurt as much as the first one. The important thing is that he didn't give up. He knew he had something, he just needed to continue trying.

Don't give up and don't let a failure get you down. Gather up the pieces and keep trying.

Posted by Harry Mylonadis 

Poke the Box! Starting, Failing and Starting Over

Last Friday I wrote about Success and Failure. Later that day, while travelling to a meeting I opened up my kindle app and started reading Seth Godin's new book "Poke the Box".

Seth's new book is about being an initiator and poking the box (i.e. starting things). One thing that he mentions as very important is that failure shouldn't stop you from starting things and that we are hard-wired to avoid failure. This is very close to the point I was making last week and reading it from someone like Seth, reinforces my thinking.

He also makes a very good point about how programmers work by poking the box and continuously trying new things to get the machine to do what they want. This is why I'm thankful for choosing Computing as my undergraduate degree. During my studies, when I was working on a problem, the answer wasn't always easy to get to. You had to continuously try things, send the code to the chip you were programming, see how it reacts and if it doesn't work, do it again. This is what poking the box is all about.

For this week how about we all try poking the box a bit more? Start something new or if something is not working well, make a few adjustments and start it over. Who knows, maybe you will come up with something very successful.

Posted by Harry Mylonadis 

To Succeed You Need to Fail

In order to be successful you need to not be afraid of failure.

Failure is only a small stop in the path to success. Fear of it, is what stops you from starting a new project, pursuing a different career or launching a new product. But only if you fail, and fail often, will you be able to see what can be successful and learn.

By failing you will gather valuable lessons and start understanding what works and what doesn't.

Don't be afraid, decide on what it is that you want to do and do it. If you see that it's failing, just quit and start something else.

Posted by Harry Mylonadis