Right Kind Of Wrong - Thoughts

When I went back to Vancouver for Christmas, I intended to rely on my company phone’s free roaming data when I was around, but a few hours after crossing the border, I racked up a 500$ Verizon bill tabbed to Facebook, and Verizon completely refused to offer me more service. And I also left my car with Grace in United States. So I was slated to spend hours on public transit with nothing more than a sleek black brick to keep me entertained.

But after a few days, I began to actually quite enjoy being disconnected from the web as I transitted - I was able to appreciate Vancouver’s breathtaking natural beauty more without the constant distraction of messenger pings, and I also started reading more. Not short form messages or reddit or blind comments, but (slightly) longer form scifi short stories. Specifically, I read Exhalations by Ted Chiang. The stories were not just a form of entertainment, but also contained meaningful content from which I can derive lessons that I can apply to my every-day life.

After finishing that book, I resolved to read more this year. I will alternate reading fiction (something I enjoyed), and self-help (something to better me). Since I started with Ted Chiang’s Exhalations, the next book I read was “The Right Kind of Wrong”, a book that explores failures - why they happen, how to prevent them, and how they benefit us. To help me remember the lessons taught in the book, I’ll attempt to summarize what I’ve learned here.

Notes

  • A failure is nothing more than something that is unexpected. Forgetting keys is a failure. The experiment not producing the expected results is a failure.
  • Basic and complex failures (ones that can be avoided by spending time to research the problem space or more careful execution, or more awareness about the situation) are not good. We should do the necessary research and execution to avoid the failures. But that does not mean we cannot learn from them.
  • Intelligent failures are ones that happen when there was no way you could have known about the outcome, and these are inevitable, and in fact good for whatever context the failures happened in, because it leads to learning
  • All failures can be learned from. Making the same mistakes leading to the same failures means you’re not learning from them.
  • Humans are hard-wired to believe we are not at fault, and when a failure occurs, often blaming external factors rather than ourselves. We do the opposite when failures happen to those around us - we tend to think those failures reflect their person. This happens unconsciously, but we should try to be aware and stop ourselves from doing so, as it robs us from opportunities to learn from these failures
  • Failures during novel contexts, like travelling to a new country where you don’t understand the language, or learning a new sport or activity, are completely expected, and a result of stupidity but inexperience, and we should not beat ourselves up over them
  • The world is a complex place, and we should carefully consider how different causes and effects are chained together - this will help us avoid cascading events that lead us to large failures.

Next is Ted Chiang’s first book of short stories!