“A recent ASQ survey about teenagers and science careers revealed that nearly all teens agree that risk-taking is required in science, technology, engineering and math careers (STEM)—but almost half say they are afraid of taking those risks. Maybe that’s because most of the parents who were surveyed are also uncomfortable with their children failing“ shared Paul Borawski in his new blog post.
Googling the definition of FAIL, it says “Be unsuccessful in achieving one’s goal“.
It sounds a shameful thing to fail; maybe because the society where we live makes us feel guilty when we fail. However, based on my experiences as daughter, teenager, engineer and mom I cannot agree more with this new “definition” of FAIL: First Attempt In Learning.
At the age 17 when I had to decide which career I would like to study, I didn’t hesitate in following my passion: Quality Software Engineer. I knew that was a risky decision. As I expressed in my previous post about STEM career in Argentina, lot of people said to me: “engineering will kill you“; “you are not gonna have life anymore“, “it will consume all your time“; those phrases definitely encouraged me more because I love challenges!
Back in 2000, when I was in the 2nd year of my career I had to take a difficult exam and I wanted to have the best score ever; I wanted to have a 10! (In Argentina the score for exams goes from 1 to 10; you approve with 4 or better, fail with 3 o lower). After 2 hs. waiting for the result, I got my score. 2! Sadness, I cried, I had studied for that exam so hard and I failed. When I called my parents to let them know my score, my mom told me, “don’t cry baby, you have more opportunities to try again, learn from this experience“. When I talked to my dad, he just started laughing and told me: “C’mom, it’s a beautiful duck! Don’t be sad. You have to have this 2, you have to fail in your career in order to learn from that and improve! If you don’t have that “duck” you don’t know how to be better!“
That “duck” help me understand, that fail is a way of learning, and risks are always going to be there, you just have to know how to take that as a opportunity for improvement instead of a rock on your path.
My quality motto I use in this blog is: “Quality is everyone responsibility and WE NEVER HAVE TO STOP GETTING BETTER” and to put that on practice you have to take risks, fail, admit your mistakes, learn, planning the improvement, implement it, make progress and keep going and going; learning is a cycle that never ends.
There are few “Learning Cycles” that you can use to help you going through a failure situation like:
– Honey and Mumford cycle with 4 stages: doing, reflecting, concluding, and planning.
– 5E learning cycle with 5 stages: engage, explore, explain, extend, and evaluate.Interesting topic that I’ll discuss in another post.
What it is important to highlight is that when you learn from failure, there is a high probability that you will not repeat that failure again. Someone said: FAIL = “First Attempt In Learning”, but once done for the 2nd time, you FAIL because you “Forgot to Apply Its Lesson”.
And because of this topic, the “Quote of the Month” I’ve selected is: “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” ~ Winston Churchill
Share your thoughts with me!
INTERESTING ARTICLES
– ASQ survey: STEM Careers Demand Risk-taking; U.S. Teens Fear It. Read
– Essays “HOW TO LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES” by Scott Berkun
