Remember when you were really bad at your job? When you were so awful at your hobby you never figured you'd make a career out of it? Remember, in short, when you were really incompetent?
Treasure those moments.
failure
Technology, Speculation, and Failure
I've talked a lot about technology in this blog – it's both a geeky subject, and something we're all interested in and dependent on. Technology is changing fast and that changes jobs for ALL of us.
I want to address how technology is changing the nature of speculation and of failure in our careers.
For many of us progeeks and fan-to-pro types, technology is making some or all of our career ambitions easier. If you want to be a writer, you can self-publish the first edition of your novel, comic, or book. If you want to do a webcomic, the tools are there – including publicity tools. If you want recognition as a history teacher you can edit wikis, write for blogs and websites, etc. If you're a musician or an aspiring one I don't even HAVE to talk about what technology has done for you.
We all look at what technology lets us do from a positive side. I'd like to call out another advantage that the onslaught of new technologies has done for us that we may not be looking at – speculation and failure.
Fandom: Fail Early and Fail Often
Failure is one of your surest paths to success in your career.
This may sound contradictory as success sounds like the path to success, but the painful if obvious truth is a lot of times we have to fail to get things right. We have to toss the old manuscript and rewrite, we have to learn a business idea is bad the hard we, we have to find out that our art skills aren't quite what we thought. If you want to succeed at your career, often times you have to try things and fail to learn what you're doing wrong (and doing right).
Fandom is an AWESOME place to fail.