#172 - Mistakes
1 Family Photo, 1 Dad-Joke, Many Highlights
Family Photo: Mistakes
Calvin's getting real good at the train museum's train simulator. The train simulator has a control panel with a bunch of switches for the brakes, the throttle, the reverser, etc. You have to throw all the levers in the right direction, in the right order, to get the train moving (and also remember to toot the horn).
Last week, Calvin successfully derailed the train by speeding through the end of the line.
—
Mistakes are important. Mistakes are part of learning.
I want Calvin and Lawrence to make lots of mistakes.
High-quality mistakes.
There are mistakes where you shouldn't do something, you know you shouldn't do it, and you do it anyways. And there are mistakes where you should do something, you know you should, but you don't. Those are low-quality mistakes. I've made plenty of those.
Then there are also mistakes where you don't know what you should do. You either burry your head in the sand (also a mistake), or you muddle on, do your best, take the results, and consider how to do better next time. That's the learning process. You're bound to make mistakes as you learn. High-quality mistakes!
I want Calvin and Lawrence to make lots of those high-quality mistakes.
It's more confusing though: sometimes you make the right decision, do the right thing, and it still turns out wrong. Sometimes you knowingly do the wrong thing, but it still works out in the end. The end-result isn't the barometer for whether-or-not mistakes were made.
Did you do what you should have? Did you know what you should have done? Should you have known?
I talked this out with my therapist/antagonist/collaborator ChatGPT and it put together the chart below.
I don't know if this framework is helpful...maybe I'll revisit after I have my next few mistakes under my belt.
--
A last thought on this: mistakes in the context of Finite/Infinite games.
Finite games have fixed rules, clear goals, and winners/losers. Chess is a finite game. Football is a finite game. Infinite games have evolving rules and no-endpoint...the goal is to keep playing. Marriage is an infinite game. Friendships are infinite games.
Between the two types of games, infinite games are much more interesting and rewarding.
So as you go forth, and decide, and act (or don't), and learn, and make mistakes...don't make mistakes that end the game.
Dad Jokes:
Driving and Dating Mistakes
Highlights: Make Mistakes
For deliberate practice to be truly effective, learners must bring their full focus and engagement to the task at hand. This can be challenging, as the work required is often difficult and demanding. Failure is common. In fact, one of the key aspects of deliberate practice is that it embraces failure as an opportunity for growth. When learners encounter obstacles or make mistakes, they are encouraged to reflect on what went wrong and what they can do differently next time. This process of continuous improvement is crucial to making lasting progress.
...
Well-designed practice has to have all of these elements: a step-by-step approach, sustained engagement, a chance to make meaningful mistakes, continually increasing challenges, and ongoing feedback. Opportunities for deliberate practice are relatively easy to find in fields that have a lot of students: sports, math, musical instruments, and learning foreign languages, to name a few. In each case, there are many trained teachers, with good lesson plans, easy access to practice, and well-thought out approaches. But in most jobs, ranging from entrepreneurship to leadership, there are few opportunities to practice until you actually start doing things. And that can be a problem.
I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars by Nikhil Suresh
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
...
The budget for our database costs was being drastically overrun. I'm not sure what the original estimate was, but I think it was intended to cost something like 200K for a year of operations, but we were now close to a million dollars.
Some quick facts:
We use Snowflake as our database, which charges you based on the size of the computer you use to run your queries.
You only pay for computers while they're on.
We probably run a few thousand queries per week, mostly developers experimenting with little tweaks for PowerBI reports that no one reads, and on average they take about 2 seconds to run.
The computers are set to idle for 10 minutes after every query.
I noticed this about a month into joining the team, and suggested we uh... don't have the computers run for like two orders of magnitude longer than they need to for every query. I literally can't remember what was said, there was some Agile bullshit about doing a discovery piece, then it just never happened.
...
At 4PM on the last day of the week, I ping a chat full of good engineers and no managers to make sure I'm not about to nuke everything, then just do it.
...
I return to work the following Monday. I suspected that this would save a bunch of money, and guess what, our projected bill dropped from a million to half a million dollars, and everyone is losing their fucking minds.
My team has spun this as a huge cost saving, when really we just applied a fire extinguisher to the pile of money that we had set alight.
Other teams are attacking my team, insisting that it can't be a coincidence that the one new guy joined exactly as we did this, and how was it possible we didn't know how to generate that kind of saving without his help? They are saying this because it makes them seem higher status and their teams only produce money in the land where you lie all day, but it is a fair question.
While my managers are very happy, they quietly suggest it may be unwise to roll out the changes to all the computers (I only did a few to be safe) because it would oversaturate the department to hear about us all day. And invite unwelcome questions. The subtext is that if we do this all slowly enough, it might seem like it took a lot of effort instead of just clicking buttons that I said had to be clicked almost a year ago.
I am asked to write some PowerPoints, which include phrases like "a careful statistical analysis of user usage patterns indicated an opportunity to more effectively allocate resources", implying that nothing was wrong, we just needed to collect more data before deciding not to let the expensive machines idle all day.
...
By identifying a handful of good engineers and going totally rogue, we outperformed the entire department pretty effortlessly. The competent people are there, just made totally impotent by the organization, and I'm still convinced that this place is probably better than the median organization.
I ask management for a 30K raise after saving 500K and my message is still unread. I suspect I will eventually receive either nothing or 5K.
I have even more meetings now because everyone wants to talk about how we saved the money. I had to make a PowerPoint. Kill me.
I would have been better off not doing anything. Let that be a lesson to you. Do you hear me? I applied myself for five minutes against my own better judgement, had the greatest success of my career, and have immediately been punished for it.
Learn from my mistakes, I beg of you.
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming and Bret Victor
Among other evils of micromanagement is lower management does not get the chance to make responsible decisions and learn from their mistakes, but rather, because the older people finally retire, then lower management finds itself as top management—without having had many real experiences in management!
How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters? by Jake Seliger
There are a lot of things I wish I’d done differently, but it’s obviously too late now, when there are weeks or months left. But there’s also little to hide, or be ashamed of at the end. I did the things I did and made the friends I made and spent longer having fun in the city than was wise, letting the the time pass instead of focusing on having a family. So many parties, such high rent, so little time: I am a creature shaped by my times. Studied the easy thing instead of the valuable thing in school, too many student loans...
...I made many mistakes and paid for them. The best thing I did was meet Bess, who is just the right person for me, to the point that people have said things to us like: “You two are really well-suited for each other” (and not meant it as a compliment). The truest mistakes are of the “not been as generous as I should have” or “decided to let those projects go” variety. The things undone and that will now never be done. But I feel lucky, at the end, to have heard from many people who say they love me and mean it, and who I can say that I love and mean it. When I hear that, I know the positives of my life outweigh the negatives.
iamJoshKnox Highlights:
AI Creativity Workshop
Want to learn more about thoughtful, creative uses of AI? Want to visit San Luis Obispo?
In September, I'm doing an AI Creativity Workshop program with the Lifelong Learners of the Central Coast.
Purchase Tickets Here
(tell your friends)
Want to Chat?
Book some time even if you don't know what you want to talk about:
https://calendly.com/iamjoshknox
Until next week,
iamJoshKnox
Love this!