on failing

it was probably 3 months ago that i first asked for help, realizing that i had no idea how to do a project that i could not visualize. learning by doing right, but heres a little secret: i fucking hate learning by doing. dont get me wrong, i understand that once you nail it, the learning is way deeper. thats great, but DIY requires time, maybe twice the time it would ordinarily take since youre learning as you go. so perhaps not best suited to when you have an upcoming deadline. WAIT! how can you say that? what about error based learning, and everything you have come to understand about the value of learning from failue? well, ive definitely become a strong proponent of the benefits of experimentation. at least in theory. but in practice, im not sure that getting thrown in at the end of the pool is the best way to teach a beginner to swim. some will learn, others will never wish to enter the water again, and a small number will need to be fished out from the bottom. rob suggested tha...

how do i say this, but i forgot that i had started a blog. my intention had been to write daily, now its been several days without an entry. i sippose theres no reason to post on a day when theres little that has changed. today i got edits back from my coach. i had given these to her 11 days ago, so im definitely concerned, because my deadline is looming. her feedback is useful, but with her health condition, she has not been present, and im not sure that this serves my purpose, i wonder if this turns out to be another dead end?

probably too gross a topic to entertain on a blog, let alone include in a thesis, but this observation came to me today while on the crapper. I keep hoping the writing will soon becme more natural, and simply floooooooooooow. I picture the day where i look out the window and unbeknownst to me it has gone dark. Ive barely noticed the time pass as ive written 10 solid pages. Its not been like tht yet, but rather, like trying despreately to shit out a tiny peanut.

brian sent me a text mesage saying i could interview him on his way to work. in a nour. sure, right, whatever. the only guy i know that runs a startup, this was pretty exciting. oh shit, no questions written, so i put some down quicjk so i wouldnt be fumbling when we spoke. good thing, his walk to work is just 15 min, and while he let me go over by around 8 min, by the end, i could tell he was in the office and had to attend to far more important stuff. so this is what i got. this is his first vc backed startup, the business he grew and sold in austin was bootstrapped. hes doing a kind of bio engineering biz to grow meat from cells. theyre on the 3rd round of funding, and i think i recall that it was some millions of dollars. so thats pre-seed and seed and then whatever comes after. they have just moved from dontown SF to berlkley, as they needed a bigger space. the team has grown to 16, and hes very confident speaking about all the stages of development like hes a pro. i just kind of ...

named j zneimer. people refered to him as jonny zed. he was ultra confident, i was not. what we shared was a girl named liz that we had both dated, and our jewish heritage. when he arrived in the states to do a masters at columbia, he and i moved in to an apartment in the 100s that i liked very much, until one day i was stabbed in the ass by one of the many adict customers of drug dealers who worked the corner. after having not said so much as a word in probably 20 years, i contacted him to talk about my thesis on how companies learn from failing. and it turns out, my proposal of a workshop within a comapany, he asked, you mean a consultation? turns out this is pretty much what he does for a living. he studied something called sports phychology, but it seems that over the last 20 years, he has shifted to a motivational expert. i can just picture him wallking into a room full of ceos and having them jump through hoops. i cant think of anyone more perfect for this type of work. totally c...

stupidly, i didnt record the conversation with yvonne, the librarian at Teesside University, where HI is acredited. I had no idea that these people were so knowledgable, but that comes to show just how little time ive spent in a library in my adult life. I sent her a first draft of my literature review, but her straightforward response was that I kind of need to let the reader know wat im talking about, before i dive into a bunch of research culled from academic articles. so like my coach, she has told me to work on my introduction which explains my aims and objectives, which tells what i am trying to do and why. Following would be my literature review of failure, which should look only at failure as it relates to learning or organizations, nothing else. Methodology needs to state what type of research techniques im using and why. Good question! We will rely on qualitative methods as I am seeking opinion rather than statistics. Once i have completed my interviews or questionaires, t...

reviewed transcript from a meeting with the program leader. thank god for otter, which makes this possible, otherwise, i wouldnt rememebr half by this morning. in terms of structure, im feeling a bit better, i can see how i much of the work ive already (interviews with 4 small business owners, and feedback from a half dosen starups) is applicable, provided i pivoy from IKEA and stick with original concept of chasing starup community. while i think it would be super interesting to investigate why IKEA are so slow to learn, and could use examples from my own experience working there for nearly 2 years, i lost sight of the experincial part of this project. i just couldnt visualize it, with Tash's help, now I sort of can. next steps: 1. find a thesis that is well organized and follow their format. 2. make contact with MEC amd MINC, incubators in Malmo. David from dojo is probably my best connection, though Magnus from Media Evoulution City of course knows everyone. 3. viewing startu...

what could be a better case study on failing than me, right now? so im midway into my thesis on failure, which by the way, was not selected for me, this was something that I chose myself. Rather than picking a topic that interested me, such as architecture or urban planning, which i thought would pigeon hole me within a particular industry, I wished to find somethng that was more universal. Marcus from Brazil suggested I think about the talk I could give at the end of this deep dive, and so I tried to think of what might make an interesting TED talk or Pecha Kucha. I did not want to bcome the worlds expert on the demise of Wework, or the chalenges brought to airbnb business mdel due to covid, so I thought i should focus on an aspect of design, to become a design expert. In particular, I love how Joe found his niche in endings, a typically overlooked aspect of design. And inasmuch as every product has an ending, his knowlege is widely applicable. Our focus in this masters has been us...