Be a scientist. Treat everything as an experiment, and every failed experiment as an opportunity to learn.
Mind Map Journal
The meaning of the quote
In August 1901, Wilbur and Orville Wright packed up their glider at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and caught the train home to Dayton, Ohio. They had shaped its wings using lift tables other inventors trusted, yet the glider lifted far less than those numbers promised. Orville later remembered what his brother said on the ride home.
“Not within a thousand years would man ever fly.”
Back in Dayton, the brothers stopped trusting the published figures and tested them. They built a small wind tunnel and ran more than 200 model wings through it that winter, writing the results down as they went.
The tests showed them which of the old numbers was off and which wing shape lifted best. In the fall of 1902, their new glider made more than 1,000 flights at Kitty Hawk.
The quote asks you to handle your own plans the same way. A scientist makes a guess, tests it and writes down what happens. If the result is bad, the guess was wrong, so she makes a better guess and tests again.
Most of us treat our own failures as a verdict on who we are, and that gets in the way of learning from them. Researchers found that people learned less from their own failures than from their successes. When the same people watched someone else fail, they learned just as much as from a success. A mistake is easier to learn from when it doesn’t feel like yours.
Calling something an experiment gives you that distance. If it goes badly, the guess failed and you didn’t.
Once mistakes stop feeling personal, you can even go looking for them. While training for the USA Memory Championship, Joshua Foer practiced faster than felt comfortable until he started getting cards wrong, and those mistakes showed him what to work on. He won the championship in 2006.
Action steps
You don’t need a wind tunnel to run an experiment. Pick 1 part of your life that isn’t working, like your study routine, your mornings or a habit you keep dropping, and test it.
- Write your guess.
Finish the sentence “If I ___, then ___.” For example, “If I put my phone in another room while I study, then I’ll finish my homework faster.” - Test it for 7 days.
A short test makes a wrong guess cheap. - Write down what happened.
Note what worked and what didn’t, the way the Wrights logged their wing tests. - Change 1 part and test again.
Keep what worked and try a new guess for the part that didn’t.
On 17 December 1903, just over 2 years after that train ride, Orville Wright flew a powered plane for 12 seconds.
Resources
- Not Within A Thousand Years (Article)
- Trial, error and the God complex (YouTube)
- Think Like a Rocket Scientist (Book)
- Is learning from your mistakes a myth? (Article)
- Learning requires confusion (Article)
- If you’re not making mistakes (Article)
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