One Year of Failing Fast

2024/Dec 27

Late last year, I signalled my intent to take a different approach to creative work. I’ll post more concrete details in my new year summary post, but what I wanted to highlight here is the power of prototyping.

To prototype an idea means to build a simple working version of an idea. As suggested by the “proto” prefix, it is meant to be a forerunner to something else. You’re supposed to build your prototype quickly, without much regard for durability, because its entire purpose is to test out if an idea can even work, or if an idea actually solves problems as intended, or if a given problem is even worth solving. Because they’re never meant to be robust solutions, even a beginner can create worthwhile prototypes using tools with which they are not terribly familiar. A failed prototype isn’t that much of a problem because only a small amount of effort is supposed to go into one. Better still, a failed prototype is almost always a net negative. The person building the prototype can learn what caused it to fail, on top of any newly attained skills necessary to put the prototype together.

Which is to say, I can spend a year mostly failing to put together software — aside from one resounding success and still derive a lot of value from the experience. Experience itself, of course, is of tremendous importance. As mentioned above, learning can make anyone better positioned for future success. In my case, I learned a truly staggering amount of infomation on how to write software using GTK, a toolkit for building graphical applications, and various related projects.

Part of my success in learning comes from previous failures in trying to learn. I had tried to follow official guides for writing apps in GTK yet I could not wrap my head around it. I could follow a tutorial, get the expected result, and yet when it came time to go beyond the instructions, nothing worked. I either failed to properly internalize the right information, or my brain simply could not wrap itself around the way I was expected to put things together. It just did not work. I put a lot of effort into trying to understand the “simple” way of doing things, but I could not produce results. I decided instead to treat the recommendations as a failed prototype, and to find a way to work with GTK that actually did fit with how my brain expected to be able to put an app together. As already mentioned, that work did indeed bear fruit. It’s something to be proud of, sure, but the relevant detail is that this success was enabled by an attitude that didn’t seek it.

The entire point of the fail fast attitude is that I get to make things in a way that I enjoy, in a way that propels further creativity, in a way that satisfies my deep-seated need to be creative. The possibility that I might occasionally cook up a masterpiece of a vase¹ is a neat side effect of this approach. The true prize of this attitude has been that it is far easier to maintain creative habits when you’re making throwaway doodads. On the off chance I hit something that really ignites my interest, if it’s a truly interesting idea then I should be able to see it through to its conclusion. If not? Fail fast, let’s see what I come up with next.