Is failure really a good thing?

    While pursuing my goal of becoming a programmer I discovered something interesting about failure. The following will detail my discovery. 

    I always heard from prominent individuals that failure is good because you learn from it. To be specific individuals like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson. While I do agree with the statement I don't think it should be taken at face value. Allot of times this advice is taken in by individuals who have failed most of their life. I think its important to recognize that the prominent individuals mentioned above had great mentors that modeled success. They also had prior successes, they understand the process. For those of us who have not had prior success or good role models, chronic failure can be harmful. Chronic failure should be seen as a symptom, it’s letting you know that your approach is wrong. 

    I was one of these individuals who never really stuck to anything, it seemed like every month I had a new goal; it was almost like a sitcom. I had unfortunately embraced the message that failure is good. Before you start learning from failure you need to have some success in your life. This will prove to yourself that you are a capable individual. Start small because if you don't the fall will break your will. Before I was abel to build iOS applications I started by taking College Courses on Mathematics and Computer Science. I then started reading books, I probably spent more than a thousand dollars on iOS books. I took it one step at a time, my goal was split up into smaller actionable goals and tasks. I wish I could share my goals and task but they filled up notebooks with checklists and they constantly changed due to the unpredictable nature of technology. 

    I eventually shipped my first iOS application to the App store. This was one of my first big success stories. I overcame many things before this milestone, for example: 

  • Apple introduces a new programing language in the middle of my learning process. I had to switch because all the new blogs and books where written in Swift. There was a time where I was learning with a mixture of Swift and Objective-C books, which was an unexpected challenge. 
  • Learning CoreData, one of the most difficult but necessary iOS frameworks out there. It was a steep learning curve but after multiple books and video courses I got over the curve. I felt like quitting multiple times but I had a plan. This time my goal was split up into small bite sized steps, quitting was not an option because the tasks weren't extremely overwhelming and I had built up my self confidence by accomplishing the previous tasks.

    Allot of good came out of my new strategy and my hard work. I was taking some Udacity courses at the time. I took the learning process very seriously and I think one of the instructors recognized that and invited me to become a code reviewer for the projects that I had completed. I shared my knowledge in the forums and eventually I was also invited to help out students in the forums. Today I’m still doing some contracting for Udacity (code reviewing and forum mentoring). My next goal is to get an iOS programing job.