If it fails where you thought it would fail that is not a failure. – from Excellent Advice for Living
This is a great quote, especially for those of us working in computer systems. We often design things like HA (which I wrote about this past week), circuit breakers, and other techniques to handle problems we know about.
When those things occur, we’ve planned for them, so I get that these are not a failure. In fact, they are a known case we’ve designed for.
The same thing for me, if I am building something on the ranch. If I put in a post and don’t cement it, and then need to add a wheel to a gate (ask me how I know this), then if the gate leans over, it’s expected.
On the other hand, if the piece of metal holding the wheel on fails, that’s a failure. I expected it would keep the wheel on, but apparently, it isn’t engineered well enough to handle a load from a slight slope. 
I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.
To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.
Voice of the DBA 
Failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it is used specifically to help determine next choices/decisions. Sometimes failure is the greatest and most valuable life lesson one can get. When we try and protect kids from failure we make them less.
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Agreed. I struggle with the parents of kids I coach who don’t want to see kids fail in any way.
I also struggle with people who fail a lot and don’t learn from the experience.
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20 years ago I had to create a 1 day training class on how to create custom financials using Excel with a proprietary property & asset management accounting software platform and I intentionally added several failures in the training so people would have to diagnose and solve. In most training I’ve ever had things go smoothly and so the people being trained aren’t faced with failure and figuring it out until there on there on.
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