Make Mistakes
Never in a book have I heard the encouragement to fail more loudly – or more often. Burger and Starbird want us to “intentionally get it wrong to inevitably get it even more right.” It’s in failure that we start to see where the errors are and what to fix.
One exercise they suggest is to assume that you will fail to do something nine times before getting it right on the tenth. In doing this though, they insist we learn from our mistakes as to why we’re doing what we’re doing and what we can change about it.
They suggest that this happens with everything. Start something and get it out there, from a book draft to a piece of software, and then start to fix the mistakes. In the book they share the rough draft of FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It originally began as “a date which will live in world history” and after revisions was changed to “a date which will live in infamy.” Burger and Starbird are suggesting that every first attempt is a draft we can identify the mistakes in and learn from.