Errors and Losers

Salman Khan, in his new book The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, talking about starting to teach his cousin Nadia:

I didn’t know how best to do this, or if it would work at all, or if anyone would watch what I posted. I proceeded by trial and error (yes, errors are allowed)…

Mark Cuban in a recent blog post, as a fictional Democratic Romney running for president:

Now some people might say that it will be very difficult to pick winners and losers and they are right. It will be very difficult. There will be losers. More importantly there will be winners.

In everything we have hypotheses and conduct experiments. Errors are allowed and there will be losers. Or rather there will be losers – some of your hypotheses will fail to provide predictive value – and so errors must be allowed (and planned for).

This offers a few ideas:

1. Avoid the search for a scapegoat and look instead for the lessons to be learned from failure.
2. Fashion our lives in a manner such that we can survive our own or others’ failures.
3. Recognize our entire life is a testing of hypotheses and so develop them and conduct experiments more intentionally.
4. Where there is little failure there may be little learning or little growth.