Personal Resilience Engineering Learning To Recover
30 January 2013
The other day I was reading an article titled Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure on ACM Communications. The article is all about accepting that system failures exist and they are inevitable. All we need to do is preparing for them rather than trying to prevent. In the article, the best practices of resilience engineering at Amazon, Google and the other companies are told by system engineers. But how about resilience engineering for personal failures? How should we deal with failures in our personal life?
Failures are real and they happen more frequently than expected. The range of failures in personal level is huge: from school to work, health to relationships etc. You can add as many as you want. Getting the job you wanted, passing a course, finishing up a project or even completing some km on treadmill to lose some weight may or may not be possible from time to time. This should be totally fine, because having a life with full series of successes seems not likely, but failing seems rather easy.
However, don’t underestimate failures. Failures are good. They tell us what’s wrong and what should be fixed not like successes. If you use the chance of recovering provided by failures, I bet succeeding would be easier and a lot more assuring. Personally I have one simple and one big example on this issue.
The simple one is about exams and may occur often. Whenever I get a low grade on a midterm, I take this as a good sign. I check my paper, try to understand what went wrong. I reevaluate my knowledge on the topic, if necessary my study plan too. Then, I try to recover from this simple failure using the failure itself as a roadmap to success.
The big one was life changing for me. Last year I was so believed in pursuing PhD abroad and becoming an academic, but I failed at the very first step1, that is admissions. Then, I took as much time as I need and went through all my plans. It lasted for almost six months, and I made some huge decisions at the end. The good part is these decisions are now turning out to be right call, and that is what I call learning to recover.
So, I think successes are good, but failures are better as long as you use them.