A week or so ago, Tara Hunt posted a thought-provoking blog entry. That isn’t really a shock since most of her pieces live in my browser tabs, waiting for some sort of response. Invariably, too much time passes before I comment and the moment is gone. Hopefully that isn’t the case for this one.

LoserCamp would be a take off from FooCamp and BarCamp, a sort of unconference bringing people together talking about the times they failed and how they learned from that failure. Many times, people don’t like to talk about their failures even if that failure spurred them onto greater things. It’s just not talked about. I’d like to see that changed and perhaps something like LoserCamp would help with that.

Failing is one of the most important things you can do and as a father, I’m finding it even more important to instill into the kids. The idea that you can fail, pick yourself up and move ahead, learning from what went wrong and making any sorts of adjustments into your future. That is what people and companies need to learn. I feel that too much of today’s plans are done via spreadsheets and metrics. Now, don’t think I’m totally down on metrics because I think they have a place in building your product roadmap but it isn’t the only thing that should go into building that roadmap. Part of the roadmap should come from intuition as well as trying different things and seeing what works and what doesn’t work.

I think one of the hidden strengths of Google’s 20% rule is that a developer can try many new things, failing more often than succeeding, yet each new project will benefit from that failure. It’s something that I would love to see instilled into the ‘Link because we don’t have the belief now that failing can lead to better things and because of that, we try to make every new application or project absolutely perfect from Day 1 and unfortunately that causes delays or things to not even make it to the public.

So get out there, try something new, skin your knees, pick yourself up and do it again.

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earthlink, google, celebrating+failure, tara+hunt

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