What’s better for learning: success or failure? Before I answer, it might be worth thinking through how you would answer this question using the above principles.
Ready?
Whether an outcome is a success or failure is irrelevant to learning. What matters is why an outcome happened and how to deal with similar situations in the future. Remember, process not outcome. Good feedback changes our mental models. Sometimes success sharpens that model, sometimes failure will, but neither has an inherent advantage.
- Jared Peterson, 6 Principles of Effective Feedback, ShadowBox Training
I have a contrarian streak in my personality, and hearing simplistic advice is a reliable way to call it forth. When I hear things like action generates information, or work smarter, not harder or the inverse the idea doesn’t matter… execution is everything, some part of me sighs heavily and reflexively pushes back, saying “well, it depends”. This experience is doubly frustrating because well, it depends is… also simplistic and useless on its own. If I’m not careful this can trigger a infinite recursion of frustration. If you see me staring into middle distance muttering “it’s contextual… it’s contextual… it’s contextual” just give my system a second to reboot.
I love the above quote because it hints at a better way to deal with overly reductive advice. One can actually figure out what the “it” actually depends on. Here: learning is dependent on process feedback, not success.
Applying this to one of the earlier examples, what would make action generates information good advice? Well, it depends on 1) not having enough information already and 2) not being able to find appropriate information from existing sources. These are both true for a domain where causal relationships are not yet knowable. Entrepreneurs creating novel solutions often operate in such a domain, and this is why you hear this advice from Mark Zuckerberg and Brian Armstrong. But if you are trying to fix your car, you’ll be much better served by reading a mechanic’s manual than just pulling random hoses out of the engine to generate information.
Thus, the hard work of taking this advice is figuring out if your problem is shaped more like a “Toyota Corolla” or a “flying car”. When Amazon launched Prime in 2005, they leaned on both routine analysis (market research on customer satisfaction) and generating information through action (launching nationwide despite negative unit economics to validate market demand). Large problems often need a mix of sub-problems, framings, and solutions. While it’s more work than “just doing things”, I contend you’ll be better off if you take the time to understand the messy nuances of your mental models.
“What does it depend on?” is often a difficult question to answer. There are years of study and experience bundled into the 3 blockquoted paragraphs above. So, my default response is actually just to ignore something that triggers my involuntary wellitdepends response. But sometimes there’s some true kernel in the reductive, and it’s nice to have techniques to explore it… lest I sink into a catatonic state by advising myself to “always ignore simplistic advice”.