Learning to Fail

One of the most valuable lessons when learning something, and one of the most difficult, is learning to fail in a useful or productive way. As a former gifted kid, this one can be very hard. Even worse, it feels like you ought to be able to learn it as a meta lesson. You know, learn it one domain and then you can just transfer it to all the other domains. Except it doesn’t quite work that way. My ego just loves getting things right out of the gate, but if you truly want to understand something, failing early and often is much more useful.

Of course you can’t just fail, you have to find a way to use that failure to learn something. Recognizing your mistakes can, in some contexts, be a huge barrier to overcome. Not just that you made a mistake, but understanding the type of mistake you made. But then you need to figure out how not to make that type of mistake again, and for non-trivial problems, that’s often an order of magnitude harder. But at the heart of it all, you have to start by actually, for real, trying something and then failing at it.

One of the things I really like about Drawabox, is that they fully embrace failure, not just as a possibility, but as a desired outcome. One of my favorite failure in the program so far is in the organic dissection lesson. You draw an organic worm shaped volume and then cut it into pieces, like slicing an earthwork. Now you have exterior surfaces and visible cut ends between the sections. The exercise is to put a different texture on each surface, but you can’t just imaging a texture. No, you have to hunt down a reference image or object for each one and then render the texture on the selected surface. By the time you’ve filled two pages with your funny worms, you’ll have looked up a lot of references.

There’s lots of scope there for failure (have you tried drawing the texture of crinkled aluminum foil?) but I found it to be a blast, even if all the research means it takes much longer than I had expected.

If you know of any other good self-paced programs, I’d love to hear about them.