Learning from past failures

We tend to share online only our successes and we rarely / never talk about our failures. In reality, we know that not everything we do ends up being a success and that sometimes we need to fail frequently / fast to get closer to our next success. In this blog post, I will share some of my past failures. 

During a long walk last week, I had the opportunity to listen to a podcast discussing the philosopher Emil Cioran and his view on failures. The podcast made me remember how I felt a few months ago when I was browsing the folders / files on an old hard drive. Which got me thinking on various unfinished projects I’ve worked on, past jobs, ideas. I felt quite sad when I realised there were so many “failures” in those folders. That said, what I now know is that I learnt a lot from all those failures. In the end, we are a product of our experiences / failures.

So, how have I failed before / lately:

• The hard drive mentioned above was full of failed projects: mobile (iOS, Android)/web apps, data collection, APIs and integration projects. Projects that started as ideas, some nearly completed but never published. Also, there were some eBooks I was interested on reading but never managed to read.
• Once I truncated a very important table from a production database. I thought I was connected to the test environment when in fact I was hitting the production DB. This was disastrous as some data was lost. Fortunately a backup recovered most of it. Great learning experience as I learnt a lot about database security and protecting system access / data.
• I enjoy very much posting on SAP Community and I haven’t posted much the past couple of months. I can find a bunch of excuses but the truth is that I haven’t dedicated the time required.
• I was on annual leave the past couple of weeks and before going on that break I set as a goal to read two books and build a web app during that time. I finished a book, barely started reading the second book, and didn’t open my laptop during the time, so zero progress on the web app 😅. Failed achieving this but it gave me time to spend quality time with my loved ones. Time to get bored, get some silence and think. Which is quite important nowadays given how noisy it is -> endless flow of information / news / entertainment / social media.

Not everything has been a failure lately, there’s been exciting bits happening as well (I will not discuss them here as I’ve already shared some through social media channels 😀).

I guess this blog post ticks one of the failures mentioned above 🎉. That being said I’m looking forward to future failures and the experiences / learning I will get from them.