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When you’re doing something, there’s this nice equation that can help you determine whether you’ll be successful:

Chances of Failure = Forces of Evil – (Brains + Experience)

The Forces of Evil are constantly working towards your untimely demise. For instance, suppose you have an important meeting with your investors. Having spaghetti for lunch is a good way to get tomato sauce on your clean white shirt. You can predict this if you’re smart (brains), or you can know this because it’s already happened (experience).

The Italian Forces of Evil

Predicting potential issues is great. You get to avoid problems you have never encountered.

But there’s a limit to how many things you can predict, especially in a short amount of time. Geniuses who can predict everything and plan accordingly are the stuff of legends and fiction. By contrast, learning from experience is far more efficient: all you need is a good memory.

Besides, having experienced a problem first-hand lets you recognize a solution when you see it used by someone else. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to convince non-technical people of the benefits of source control when they’ve never had their documents overwritten by someone else?

While useful, learning from the mistakes of others is less efficient. You don’t have the searing, vivid memories of your own failure to drive the lesson home, and you don’t have a detailed recollection of all the little things that went wrong.

Sure, sometimes it’s hard to learn from your personal experience, especially when once-in-a-lifetime situations. The cost of trying again has a huge impact on how experienced you can become.

At one end of the spectrum, we have suicide bombers. They never get a second chance. At the other end, we have modern computer programmers. They can fail as many times as necessary, because it only takes an edit-rebuild-run cycle to try again. And the ideal place to be is…

…in the middle. Because there won’t be any searing, vivid memories of your failure if it can be overcome within three seconds.

All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings silly mistakes in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.

Anonymous art institute instructor, quoted by Chuck Jones, adapted by me

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• Seven Steps for Fast Learning : try failing in unusual ways
• Improve : it’s not enough to accumulate experience, you have to use it
• Fast Learners : how you learn is as important as how much time you spend learning
• Copy-Paste Your Insight : new experience can be applied to old topics