failure Archives - Create an Adaptable Life

How to Acknowledge Our Disappointment and Decide How to Restart

question of the week / Johanna / November 6, 2024

We’ve all had terrible disappointments in our lives, personal, professional, and societal. Somehow, most of us find ways to live with the personal disappointments. I’m not going to discuss those because I’m not a therapist. Professionally, I’ve experienced several project-based disappointments. We either didn’t deliver what the customer wanted or we didn’t deliver it when […]

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What Would It Take for You to Fail to Success?

question of the week / Johanna / September 1, 2022

On my other blog, I’ve been explaining that my WIP (Work in Progress) is way too high and what I’m doing about that. (Writers, this means all my work, not just my current writing project.) But I didn’t explain how my WIP got so high. I’m trying to fail to success. I learned about this

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Are You Failing Fast or Learning Early?

question of the week / Johanna / April 21, 2016

In the agile community, we have a saying, “Fail fast.” It means we are supposed to feel safe to fail, and that we want to fail fast so we can use that learning to iterate on the requirements. We have opportunities to improve. I like the idea that it’s safe to fail. No one berates

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Are You Trying or Experimenting?

question of the week / Johanna / July 30, 2014

I experiment a lot. I attempt something, measure my results, use those measurements to see what’s going on, reassess and change my attempt for the next time. I do this with my weight training at the gym, my writing, my book writing and production, and my work. When I experiment, I can inspect and adapt.

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What if I Fail?

question of the week / Johanna / February 26, 2014

Some people are afraid of failure. I’ve already said that I’m afraid of mediocrity. But that’s me. Sometimes that fear of failure is so fierce that it is paralyzing. Sometimes, even worse, the fear of failure produces the very thing we fear. I see this a lot in my clients. They want assurances that their

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