There is a stigma around scientist that we love to experiment.
But that’s the Disney version of our job.
What we really love, is to obtain the results that we expected, with the minimum number of iterations required to confirm our findings.
You see, some experiments may take you weeks to prepare, especially when you are working with keeping laboratory cells in a dish alive and happy. Sometimes, you pull 12h shifts just to get a single datapoint.
And to come out empty handed with no results after sacrificing your social time, your lunch break and your sanity… well, it really sucks.
That’s why I don’t quite agree with this simplified notion of our feelings:
“When a scientist has a hypothesis and it turns out to be wrong, they’re not upset. That’s how it’s supposed to work!”
We would be robots if we wouldn't let failure interfere with our emotions. Failure is deeply personal, even though we are ‘just’ experimenting. It’s YOUR literature research, YOUR experimental design, YOUR hands pipeting, YOUR mind thinking overtime on the line to get it right.
All of this to say: when experiments fail, of course we ARE upset.
But sometimes, failure, frustration, even anger can fuel something unexpected: the perseverance to keep going.
Surely, if you fail often enough you increase your chances of getting it right the next time. You adjusted all the parameters, checked the experiment design twice, learned from your mistakes. It is highly likely though that you will fail again. Until your anger leads you to either suceed or abandon the project completely in favor of a different, unexpected route.
Either way, you keep going.
Rage, I found, also fuels many creative projects.
In a previous newsletter, I wrote about Milly Tamati building a cycle-sync app out of her own personal frustration.
Talking with self-published authors, one of the striking motivations to get a book project done (even without deadline, without accountability, without stress) is the anger simmering inside and the pain of not writing being bigger than the pain of writing.
I think aiming for minimizing the disapointment is a mistake.
In fact, maybe you should aim for disappointment, because that means you will have given everything you've got to make the experiment, the project, the book, a success.
If you are just messing around without any stakes involved, have you even tried to succeed?
Keep up the audacity,
Laura
PS. I’m 40% in The Obstacle is the Way and despite this minor disagreement, I love it so far! So many lessons that can be applied to visibility and creating online.
PS 2. This newsletter was partly “written” by today’s sponsor, Wispr Flow
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