Rising from failure · Noam Lerner's Blog

submited by

Style Pass

2024-10-26 13:00:03

Failures and inevitable when trying to achieve big things. This is true in many aspects in my life. Family, work, maintaining a training routine, and more. The cliche says that ’the road to success isn’t a straight line’. When working towards the goal - there will be some detours. The question is - how to navigate through those.

An image of a person rising from failure, by ChatGPT. Usually, this isn’t as dramatic

The first step from rising from failure is to acknowledge that it had happened. You should acknowledge that something sub-optimal has happened. A failure, a mistake, a detour, a bug, a bad decision, something. It might be also beneficial to acknowledge the failure to others as well. It’ll help with accountability. Owning a failure can build confidence in others that you’ll fix it, and that you’ll try to prevent it from happening again.

As failures are bound to happen, it makes sense to build systems in a way so that they’ll be fast and easy to recover from failures. An example from production systems is how fast can you push a hotfix. When you trust your push process, you can push new code, configuration or both when there’s an issue. Another example is having knobs which are consumed from systems at runtime. When you have those in place, you can change a knob and the effect be applied faster than a full code or configuration push.