RWDevCon 2016 Inspiration Talk – Embracing Failure by Janie Clayton

Tip #4: Do What Makes You Happy

Also, just do things that make you happy.

I know for a really long time, we’ll have the mindset that any hobby or thing that we do has to eventually lead to something else. I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m bad at doing the away from keyboard thing. For me, my hobbies are going and writing code for myself as opposed to code that I’m being paid to write for other people.

I recently started cooking because it was something I needed to learn how to do. I’d never been on my own before. I was getting really tired of all of the nasty packaged food that I was getting from the grocery store. It was just something I wanted to do for myself.

It wasn’t because I wanted to be a chef or because I wanted to write a cook book, even though I’ve been told I should do that at some point. It was a thing that I wanted to do because it was important to me and I wanted to know that I could cook. I wanted to be able to make food and feed myself and do things properly because it was something that was important to me.

Do things that make you happy, without thinking about where it’s going to lead or what it’s going to do for you. Go out and dance badly if it makes you happy because our lives do not revolve around other people. We have to do what we want to do to make ourselves feel good.

Tip #5: Acknowledge Your Mistakes

That also includes being able acknowledge if you’ve made a mistake.

I know a lot of people who, from the time they were really little, they wanted to be game developers because they loved video games and that was the only thing they ever wanted to do.

So they spent all of their school time trying to learn how to do game development. They went to college for game development. Then they get into the industry and game development is not the best place to work for a lot of people because there is a lot more people who want to do it than there is market for it.

I can understand. If you spent all of your life thinking that you were going to do something and you spent a lot of money and you went into a lot of debt. Then you go into this field and find out that it’s something you don’t really like doing. It can be really hard to acknowledge that this is something that you don’t want to do and to walk away from it.

Since we’re at an Apple developer conference, I feel it is necessary to mention Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is one of my heroes.

I know I really shouldn’t think of Steve Jobs as one of my heroes because he’s a person who was paying orphans in China 20 cents to make iPhones, but one of the things that I really admire and respect about him that I’ve taken away from his story was what happened to him when he got forcibly removed from Apple.

This was a horrible, awful experience that he went through where he lost the company that he founded. There were a couple of different ways he could respond to this.

He could have taken all of his Apple money and go on and bought a scuba shop on the beach and told everybody about how he used to be a big tech guy, but he didn’t do that. He wanted to be able to move forward and do something else.

He dusted himself off and moved on. He started NeXT. He bought Pixar. He did a whole bunch of stuff after that happened and eventually he came back and he led the company to what it is today.

I think it’s important for everybody to understand that we’re all going to fail and what happens after you fail is just as important as what happened before you failed.

If you’re able to analyze your failures and look at what happened and what led to it, you’re able to get an idea about how you can avoid failing again in the future. I know people who horrible things happened to them because they made really bad decisions, but they didn’t want to acknowledge that they had any personal responsibility for what happened to them. You know, it was just a fluke of the universe.

I think of my ex-husband, who lost his job while we were still married because he started taking every single Friday off and made it very clear to his company that he didn’t want to be there. When I talked to him afterward I’m like, “Okay. Do you understand why you lost your job.” He’s like, “Yeah. It’s because the universe sucks” and he wouldn’t acknowledge that he had any control over what happened to him.

When you fail, you can either walk away and decide the universe sucks, or you can do the really hard thing of taking a look in the mirror and saying, “What can I do to avoid having to do this ever again?”

I really hope that everybody here feels a little bit more comfortable about trying to embrace their failures and being able to go out and try something that might be a little bit less familiar. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t do particularly well at it the first time. It takes a little while and if you keep working at it, you’ll do better.

So go forth and be awesome!