Failure for Fun and Profit!

Do you actually know how deliberately acquire, sharpen, and retain a technical skill? In this talk, I'll discuss common strategies to enable you to be more focused, creative, and productive while learning, by using play, exploration, and ultimately failure. You'll leave knowing several "Experiential Learning" patterns and techniques that can help you turn failure into success. When was the last time you failed in a spectacular fashion? Was it really so bad? If you want to succeed, you first need to take a little time to fail.

Transcript

1. FAILURE FOR FUN AND PROFIT Monday, April 8, 13 Fun /AND/ profit?? Failure isn’t fun! Nobody really want to /fail/ -- but Im telling you here and now that making mistakes and breaking things just to see what happens is the absolute best way to learn something, anything! If you’re not making a glorious, exhilarating mess, how can you say you really know /why/ we try to avoid these things? To paraphrase the Sufi sage-fool Nasreddin - ‘good ideas come from experience, and experience comes from bad ideas” What’s the sound like?
2. Monday, April 8, 13 Scientific Method, anyone? Until you act like a scientist, you won’t truly learn things. We’ve all cut-n-pasted our way through a problem to get to Done, but what have you actually learned? If you don’t poke and prod at it, take it apart and see what /doesn’t/ work, how will you know why what does work works?
3. “The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t mislead you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know” Monday, April 8, 13 “The real purpose of the sci meth is to make sure nature hasn’t mislead you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know” Asking questions is how we define what it is we know, and conversely, what we don’t know. Having all the answers means you’re asking boring questions. Always succeeding just means you’re only doing the achievable. You need to keep asking questions you may think you have answers to.. you may find that you don’t actually know what you think you know, or even that you’ve asked the wrong question to begin with.
4. I have a few hobbies... Monday, April 8, 13 Like many devs, I didn’t start as a software engineer, but found my way to it after other successful careers as a lighting designer, professional poker player, puppeteer, and sous chef. I’m a self-representing glass artist, I’ve published 2 role playing games, and on the weekends I’m either hiking or fixing vintage Vespas. I tell you this not to make any pretentious claims to being amazing or talented, rather that I find myself frequently in a place of not knowing what it is I don’t know, of starting as a complete Novice with nothing more than an interest and a passion for the topic at hand, and a willingness to slog through the often awkward process of learning something new. That experience of being out of my element, in over my head, is scary, intimidating, and thrilling. As “Me high Chick sent me high-ee” put it in his book, “Flow” "[Not all] experiences may be particularly pleasurable at the time they are taking place, but afterward we think back on them and say, "That really was fun" and wish they would happen again. After an enjoyable event we know that we have changed, that our self has grown: in some respect, we have become more complex as a result of it."
5. Monday, April 8, 13 Why do we get so stressed about learning, about trying new things? no one want to look foolish or amateur in front of coworkers, on Twitter or Github... most importantly perhaps, in front of ourselves. Its scary territory to find ourselves in - not knowing what it is that we don’t know, without guide or map. Inside of most of us there’s a memory of being a kid on the playground, when you didn’t care who won or lost at tag, but instead played for the simple joy of running around with your friends.. do you really remember, or ultimately /care/ about how many schoolyard games you won or lost? What if we made our learning just as fun and carefree as that? The idea is simple -- If you want to learn something new, sharpen an existing skill or talent, remove the risks of failure. Redefine “failure” from a negative event to a condition of discovering what you don’t know, as a data point. Find the excitement that got you into this crazy field of ours to begin with. Get out your toys, and play. [http://www.flickr.com/photos/phalinn] This talk is split into 3 sections. ✿ Pool Shark & some science ✿ conditions for learning ✿ techniques for focusing the learning ✿ deconstruction ✿ obstruction ✿ let me tell you about how I became a pool shark in 2 weeks ✿ I'm a lead developer at Blue Box Group, where we have the usual geek clubhouse toys..
6. Monday, April 8, 13 including a nice pool table, which is our primary obsession these days. Not content with the classic pool hall games of 8-ball, 9-ball, or cut-throat, we play a peculiar game invented by our Principal Technologist he and his brother invented when they were kids The rules are simple — after the break, the person whose turn it is has to attempt to simply hit whichever ball on the table their opponent chooses with the cue ball. There are a few wrinkles, naturally, but more or less the game boils down to “try to make the most difficult shot possible.” ✿ The game has basically one rule ✿ Try to make the most difficult shot possible ✿ I love pool but am bad ✿ went hand in hand with being a poker player ✿ joined a league, played whenever I had the chance, but never got good beat friends at the bar [http://www.flickr.com/photos/henrytapia]
7. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ great demonstration of redefining failure ✿ forced to make impossible shots ✿ no one really expects to make every shot, so you’re freed to try ✿ english ✿ multi-cushion shots ✿ could explore side effects ✿ entire game improved ✿ learning a new programming technique or language ✿ challenge yourself to learn through exploration and trials ✿ If you're not running into things you don’t know or can’t remember, you're not practicing - you're just warming up. ✿ So what's going on here? Why does taking the emphasis off succeeding or accomplishing goals accelerate our learning? How does this work? Let’s talk a little science
8. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ You’re probably familiar with the traditional right brain/left brain split - ✿ left brain controls math and logic ✿ right brain art, music, and language ✿ In general these are delicately balanced - when one is active, the other powers down ✿ You can either focus on the shot, or you can worry about being catching the bus home. Its difficult to do both at once well ✿ learning requires both kinds of thinking - imagination and reasoning ✿ learning is the discovery of truth ✿ the connection of abstract ideas into a new whole ✿ we adjust our reality to incorporate the new fact
9. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ cognitive scientists studying abstract reasoning ability under stress ✿ 2 groups of chimps ✿ pattern of dots ✿ rewarded for identifying the original ✿ slow abstraction and variation ✿ the groups performed about equally picking up on the variations ✿ follow-up experiments weeks later borked
10. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ Similar task/reward experiments with rats isolate the effect ✿ small failures/stress before success increased the memory retention ✿ large doses of stress had a negative impact on memory ✿ when stressed, the brain prioritizes the here and now over the future ✿ doesn’t waste energy attempting to create new memory structures ✿ stress hormones flood the brain and prevent dopamine, the “feel good” hormone, released when we solve a problem
11. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ Calvin Pool ✿ removed the stresses and risks involved with winning or losing ✿ put the emphasis on fun ✿ expecting to fail, no one to impress ✿ lowered the stress ✿ increased the pleasure-reward of success ✿ For our brains, this is really powerful stuff ✿ We are wired to learn stronger memories more quickly from fun, exciting environments than stressful ones ✿ We are designed by nature to flourish through play ✿ Other social animals restrict play to children and adolescence - once social hierarchy is established, it ends ✿ we are nearly unique that we continue to play as adults ✿ engaging in play appears critical for maintaining intelligence, brain plasticity, and mental health as we age
12. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ Johan Huizinga ✿ Dutch philosopher, comparative linguist, cultural theorist, physiologist ✿ wrote in his groundbreaking work "Homo Ludens" (1938) ✿ The act of playing is an event which occurs within a specific boundaries space and time, in which the normal rules of life generally don't apply, done for its own sake. We play because it is fun. ✿ Play begins, and after a specified time, ends, and we're left with the memory of an event. Our brains latch on to this outlier as "significant" and place greater meaning on it than the normal humdrum world. What does play require of us?
13. SPACE Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ create a SPACE separate from your everyday life so our brains will give it more weight ✿ minimize intrusion of the normal, ordinary world ✿ turn off wifi, Twitter, and the TV for a while ✿ listen to different music ✿ physically go to someplace new to work ✿ PacSci ✿ aquarium ✿ local library [http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyandorla]
14. TIME Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ set aside a solid block of TIME ✿ to truly explore ✿ to see the side effects ✿ to generate the happy accidents ✿ break things, and see what happens [http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucasjames123]
15. COURAGE Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ The fear of failure stifles creativity. BE BRAVE! So much of our daily life is centered around being domain experts - our survival depends on knowing viable patterns, methods, techniques, solutions. Not knowing the answer, or the path towards an answer, is a threat, but here we are expecting and inviting failure. ✿ The rules are different here. Explore them! ✿ With CONFIDENCE and HUMOR, you will find yourself courageous enough to attempt the most bizarre things, things that you might normally assume you already know.. but perhaps nature is deceiving you? ✿ Courage to step into an place where the rules are different and the way forward is unclear? [http://www.flickr.com/photos/cabbit]
16. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ Joseph Campbell’s hero's journey or “mono myth” ✿ the Hero travels to a region in which the normal rules no longer apply ✿ the realm of the fairies ✿ kingdom of the sky giants ✿ faces a trial ✿ seizes a gift or reward ✿ returns to the normal world ✿ life is forever changed Isn’t learning something new is a heroic act of venturing forth from your place of comfort to seize the fire of knowledge from the Gods? What abyss are we facing?
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22. Monday, April 8, 13 Isn’t learning something new is a heroic act of venturing forth from your place of comfort to seize the fire of knowledge from the Gods? What abyss are we facing?
23. Monday, April 8, 13 You sit down to explore the new Rails object pattern of the week, its 10am and you don't have any meetings until 11:30, so let's get started. Oh, except you need to send an email to your boss. There’s a new pull request you’ve been meaning to review, better do that real quick. Oh, and the yard needs raking. Hmm, phone beeped, is it a move in Words with Friends, or something on Twitter? The dog needs to get his booster shots. Wait, YOU need booster shots, maybe a quick call to the doctor..
24. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ your brain is the abyss! ✿ Every single one of us has stimulus addict of a brain ✿ distract you with irrelevant tasks ✿ its uncomfortable, starting at a blank terminal window, unsure where to begin ✿ not knowing the answers can be uncomfortable ✿ we’re used to being experts ✿ asking dumb questions is scary ✿ Give yourself TIME to get work past this ✿ It may seem impossible at first, but sit with it ✿ work through this period ✿ you will find that in 10, 15 minutes, your mind /will/ begin to settle [http://www.flickr.com/photos/30228426@N03]
25. Monday, April 8, 13 We’ve limited distractions and set aside time for ourselves, and stepped outside of our normal constraints to have a singular, passionate moment. An 'aesthetic experience' if you will. Sir Ken Robinson, an education reformer in the UK, defines an ‘aesthetic experience’ as “one in which your senses are operating at their peak. When you’re present in the current moment. When you’re resonating with excitement of this thing that you are experiencing. When you’re fully alive.” That sounds AMAZING!
26. ANXIETY BOREDOM SKILL CHALLENGE Monday, April 8, 13 “Me high Chick sent me high-ee”, on flow --: "Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act." In trying to have this Aesthetic Experience, we walk the balance beam of flow, between anxiety and boredom. When learning, we don’t have control over our skill - we are novices. The one element we /do/ have control over is the difficulty or challenge of our experience.
27. Monday, April 8, 13 In a pool tournament, we stare at the table, trying to predict the path of each ball, attempting to discern the right angle and spin, creating a mental model of how it /should/ work. We try to balance all the myriad way this could go right, and how it could go wrong. Will the cue ball caroom into a pocket? Where will the cue ball come to rest? Are we actually going to sink our own ball? Are we accidentally aiming at an opponents ball? In Calvin Pool, we narrow the entire set of variables down to “hit this one ball” There’s no complications beyond the moment, no consequences to balance, consider, and ultimately be overwhelmed by. We can maintain happiness and flow state by controlling the challenge.
28. DEFINE LIMITS Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ don’t get lost in the rathole of naming your project, or which framework would work better ✿ why I came to Ruby late ✿ define our special rules or things we want to learn ✿ maybe we use an unfamiliar technique ✿ /really/ TDD ✿ use HAML or Slim instead of ERB (or vice versa!) ✿ store everything in disk instead of memory ✿ make life hard for yourself ✿ stretch yourself ✿ You’ll rapidly learn a lot about what it is you do and don’t already know. ✿ We're limiting our time, so we need to focus what we apply ourselves to ✿ reduce variables [http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik]
29. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ DECONSTRUCT and OBSTRUCT THE PROBLEM ✿ find a simple, obvious task you understand well ✿ repeatedly solve it ✿ add complications and obstructions ✿ By taking it apart, we can begin to apply divergent thinking ✿ alternative solutions or results from the same starting point
30. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ repeatedly solving the simple problem with different techniques allows you to compare ✿ how techniques influence the solution ✿ what the path towards the solution ✿ even to redefine the problem to begin with! Alan Kay said, that “A change in perspective is worth 80 points of IQ” Through this comparison we can begin to internalize the purpose and meaning of different techniques, turning experience into skill, skill into knowledge, into wisdom ✿ For instance, let's take this User Story as a place to start: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberslayer]
31. "The user will be able to convert a temperature in Celsius to Fahrenheit, and vice versa." Monday, April 8, 13 Pretty easy, eh? It'll take maybe 2 minutes of Googling, tops, to find all the equations, 2 minutes more to find a repo or blog post about how to solve it. ✿ we don’t want to solve the problem ✿ focus on /how/ we solve it
32. ★ make it a gem ★ make it a service ★ mobile app ★ aggregate data ★ 3rd party API ★ offer other scales Monday, April 8, 13 Each of these extends the original problem, and give us new wrinkles to explore, without having to worry about "have I figured out the base user case of temperature conversion", ✿ easier to have a detached approach ✿ easier to isolate the exact piece we’re interested in learning more about
33. Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ we’re building models ✿ childhood toys ✿ fun and exciting to play with ✿ we don’t care if they break ✿ at some point, we start to care, because it has meaning or value ✿ collectible? ✿ what do we do then? ✿ put on a shelf or in a box ✿ github - maybe it gathers dust, maybe it surprises sometone - who knows [http://www.flickr.com/photos/donsolo]
34. Fizz-Buzz! https:/ /github.com/kerrizor/fizz-buzz Monday, April 8, 13
35. version 0.5 full test suite (MiniTest) 1.8, 1.9, 2.0, JRuby, and REE TravisCI, CodeClimate, benchmarks Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ but I wasn’t done
36. http:/ /FizzBuzz.io HTML! JSON! XML! Monday, April 8, 13
37. ...and then some! OAuth API EC2 fizzbuzz processing Twitter listener SMS and email delivery Monday, April 8, 13
38. READ A MAN PAGE Monday, April 8, 13
39. ADOPT A GEM Monday, April 8, 13
40. PAIR PROGRAMMING Monday, April 8, 13 Find a pair working with someone else supercharges the exchange if information, and you’ll both learn and grow. You’ll be switching the left and right side of your brain, logic and language, and find yourself more engaged and In The Moment
41. TEACH Monday, April 8, 13 Go teach something! It acts as a focusing lens for what you know and what you don’t know, by reducing all those variables and distractions down to the level of a beginner’s question, changing your perspective. Engaging the right side of your brain to explain something to someone * study group * book club
42. “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself." Monday, April 8, 13 ✿ Chuck Close ✿ want to improve, you have to put in the time ✿ make that time a playful exploration ✿ Malcolm Gladwell’s 10k can be reduced ✿ more inspiration for applications and new directions ✿ divergent thinking will arise
43. Monday, April 8, 13 In order to learn, and learn effectively, and have it stick in our brains, we need to reduce the risk to ourselves. We need to practice, to have fun with it, to explore and play with the problems. We need to create spaces where failure is accepted, where its expected, and by embracing that failure, we learn the limits and boundaries of our knowledge, and discover that the only monsters beyond what we know are those we create ourselves.
44. fin Monday, April 8, 13
45. THANKS! ★ @kerrizor ★ glass artist ★ vespa mechanic ★ lighting designer ★ professional poker player ★ Senior Developer @ Amazon, Contour.com, Blue Box Group Monday, April 8, 13