failure, that’s behind
me, that’s gone, but
what did I learn? And
that’s the thing I write
down, I write down in
my journal that I tried
this, it didn’t work, but
this is what I learned.
And then I might get a
new idea. You don’t do
it stupidly. It’s not stupid fast failure – that’s
a bad thing. I don’t
want to do things that
make no sense at all
- that’s not what it’s
about. But it’s to take
the information I have
and make the good
judgement of some
things I should try. And
then if they fail, mark
down what I learned,
and say I failed, but it’s
like treating everything
like an experiment. All
of life is an experiment
if you think this way.
MM. The more we
fail, the more chances we have to succeed?
KJ. Sometimes. I mean,
I can’t say that I won’t
get there if I don’t; I
may have no failures
and get to the solution, and that would
be OK too. But I think
if you look at intelligent fast failure, you
may find places where
you couldn’t have proceeded any other way.
You explore spaces
you may have missed
otherwise. If you look
at some of the problems we have to solve
in our world today,
they’re very difficult,
they’re very challenging, they’re very complicated. We’re going to
have to explore every
space we can to find
the solutions to some
of these things.
21
MM. Are we better
when we work alone
or when we work in
teams?
KJ. You make a very
good point. There are
times when working
alone is actually the
better thing to do. So
we shouldn’t think we
have to work in a team
to get things done, but
we have to learn to
work in teams because
many of the things we
want to do we can’t do
alone, and if we can’t
do it alone we need to
learn how to collaborate. Collaborating is
not something humans
beings know how to do
when they’re born but
if you watch little children they know how
to do it to a certain
extent.
And then at some point
it’s ‘no, that’s my car,
that’s my toy, that’s my
bunny rabbit’, or whatever. So you have to