How to Learn from Mistakes and Errors

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we're looking at mistakes, errors, missteps, and how to learn from them. How to take a positive out of those. How to take lemons and make lemonade. This episode is probably one of the more recent bits of foolishness in my life, but it has a lot of good lessons to it. And some I already knew, which is why it was so foolish. This is recently, it's a few years ago now, we were playing hockey. It's ice hockey game. We're in the middle of a hard fought battle and we get a guy break away, takes a shot. Everybody on our bench like jumps up and down score goal or in soccer, if I were to say it's goal. But the referee waved it off and said, nope, it is not a goal. And we were, as we do at times, we were telling the ref like, hey, there's that was a goal. You missed it. There's no way. And he made a decision that was very different that hasn't happened before in a lot of years of sports of various kinds. As he said, he said, no, it was definitely not a goal. And I bet you a hundred bucks. It was not a goal. And he knew and we all sort of knew that the other team we were playing, they're big fans of themselves. So they record themselves. They have recording of all their games and they have cameras mounted in like a couple of different places. I think. But one would be the perfect place to see whether it was a goal or not. So you could actually go to video review. You couldn't do it right away. We're going to have to wait a couple of days. But in our fervor, several of us are like, you're on. And it was one of those in the heat of the moment. And I think I think more people think more people said you're on than later fessed up to it. So flash forward a little bit. We get to the end of the game and we still were given the referee a little bit of grief. But he said, OK, you know who I heard some of you guys wanted to bet me a hundred bucks. So who is it? And three of us, right? Us being me, one of them. I was like, all right. I ran my mouth. Plus, it's worth the price of admission basically to go figure it to see this one through. And so three of us are like, I did. And he said, OK, and ended up emailing us a few days later, emailed us a recording. And we did not win the bet. He did. Now, this was worth it almost as far as a lesson of perception. Now, where we were, where we were positioned and where he was positioned, neither of us, none of us were like right on top of it. We were on one side of the ice essentially, and he was more or less as far out as we were on the other side of the ice. Now, the shot came in on the post, the goalpost closest to him, and it came in, hit the post, shot across to the other post and then back out. Didn't cross the goal line. Now, the interesting thing for myself and the other guys that were in the team, because we talked about this, what we saw was the puck went straight in, hit the back of the net, and then hit the goalie and then eventually trickled out. And we saw like the net move. We saw from the the direction of the shot that it made no sense that it hit that post and came back out that way. The direction, the angle made much more sense. And actually it was like it would have been impossible, we thought, for it to hit the post and go out the way we saw it come out. Now, this is where perception is really interesting. I could remember when I was watching it, I remembered roughly, you know, it's obviously it's tainted a little bit because now you've a little bit, you know, a couple days have passed, but I could remember roughly what I saw and how I saw the puck move. Now, the camera angle was different enough that obviously you were able to see exactly what happened, but also that I was able to sort of marry his referee's perception, what he saw and what we saw. And because of angles and distance and things like that, it was a perfect overlay that what we saw or what we thought we saw was 100% correct. However, because of the angle that we were at, it was, I guess you have to say 100% wrong. And this, the error here was for me to open my mouth and say, no, there's no way because and it was foolish because I have been on the referee's side of that many, many, many, many times. It is amazing how point of view and perspective can be dramatically different and people will swear up and down that their point of view is the truth until you get a different perspective and they realize that, oh, no, no, no. What I saw was not exactly how it worked. Sometimes it's obvious. It's, I say obvious. It's things that you can easily point to. For example, in sports when a referee is making a call, sometimes the people that are griping about the call, you know, saying it should have been made or should have made whatever it is, are on the opposite side of bodies. So they're actually either the referee or the fans or the players are blocked from actually seeing. And so that's something that you can sort of, I think most people accept. It's like, okay, if I'm on one side of a wall and you're on the other side of wall, there's going to be things I can see that you can't. That is what it is. That's physics. But it's a little more. It's definitely different and harder for people to grasp the idea that just your point of view. Can throw it off where you can have, you can see completely an action or something going, you know, no obstructed view, but because of your point of view versus another person's point of view, they see something very different. And that the big lesson here is that is not just visual are and this is where we'll get into the building being a better developer kind of thing. Your point of view in on topics on solving problems on defining a problem is going to come from different sets of experience. It is a different perspective. You can have two people sit in the same room, talk about the same problem and have a totally different point of view about it. It can be dramatically different. And if you walk into it, assuming that you have the, you know, in quotes, the correct perspective, then you're missing out. One, because you need to understand what their perspective is to be able to explain if if you are correct to explain why their perspective is skewed or whatever is not is off and vice versa. You have to be open to the idea that your point of view, your perspective is is not the truth that they have a better view of it or a more we'll say a more realistic view of a situation. And this was this is a mistake that was was costly in a monetary sense because it was one of those are like you shouldn't have done that. It was probably a mistake on his part, although I'm I assume he saw he was on it enough that and he probably never explained it probably saw what he saw. Saw it as it was, but also had an idea of what because of his perspective, he was also, I think, and if he had paid attention up, he could have told us what we saw based on what he saw. Because if you know what happens and you know different perspectives, then you also can essentially assume what people are going to see from these different perspectives. The more you understand your perspective, the more you understand reality, the more you understand other perspectives, the more complete picture you give and the better your ability to help people that are having struggles in their different perspectives get on the same page or understand what actually happened or is happening. Understand the reality of the situation as opposed to the either the blinders or the obstructions that cause them to see something differently. Now, the challenge in this is that in a sense, they're not wrong. They're not wrong. This is not a it's not a negative that they see something differently because they are based on their experience based on their position, their point of view and all that kind of stuff. They have a very valid position to take. And you have to understand that before you try to go in and just blow it all up completely and act like they don't know what they're talking about because they do. In some cases, they can tell you explicitly they can walk you through why they see or think a certain way. And you're going to have to explain to them not that they're wrong because their logic could be flawless, but that they are missing something or obstructed from something. Or there's something else that they you know that they didn't see that needs to be added into the mix. And this goes with a lot with problem solving and requirements gathering and talking about building a solution that makes sense. Because people are going to particularly customers that have an existing system of some sort or existing processes, they're going to gravitate towards that. That's what they know. That's what their experience is. That's to them. That's that's how it should work. And sometimes that that may not be completely true because sometimes the the process is 100 percent correct for some assumptions that they've made. And particularly we're going in and solving problems and providing a will say I mean, I guess they're all new solutions, but a a solution that is maybe. Not quite along the lines of it changes their process. Let's say when we're solving a problem and part of our solution is to go back to their source material, their processes and tweak those so that they have a different process that ends up in a better, faster, cheaper, better looking, whatever solution. Then that can be a challenge because people are going to say, no, this is how the process has to work. And it's a little bit of a cart before the horse thing, because in this case, in our example, we assumed there was a goal and we had a couple of things that we saw that reinforced that or that that got us to that assumption. You know, like we saw the net move or we, you know, we saw the puck come in, go in this angle and we saw it come out this other angle. So therefore it must be a goal. And we sort of took the endpoint of it was a goal and then went back and it's basically sort of confirmation bias to go back and looking at those things saying, oh, yeah, that definitely was had to be that way, had to be that way. How would that had to be that way? We sort of walked backwards a little bit from our from the solution. And that's not uncommon where we have things that we think are set in stone or that are reality and they really aren't. It's our perspective makes some reality because we don't know that there's another option maybe or that there's another point of view there. But once we do, then it changes things. And when we go in and solve these problems, that's part of what if you're if you're changing processes, that's part of what you need to highlight is to say, you know what? This way you've done it. Yep. Works great. It's awesome. You guys are used to it. You have it is consistent. You produce the results that you need to produce on a regular basis. However, these assumptions that you make, you know, here's some assumptions that you've made that has made that process you've used in the past the best solution. But now we're going to point out that these couple of assumptions are not entirely correct or they've changed or whatever. And when you remove those assumptions, it frees you up to have a different process, different solution. And maybe overall a, you know, an easier to solve problem and one where the solution is much more is a better solution and more user friendly or however it is that it's a better solution. So there's value in understanding that and it's valued far greater than a hundred dollar bet. In understanding that people have different perspectives and that those perspectives not only may be very valid to them, they may be very useful to you in order to get the complete picture. Because when you think about it, that's what we got in this situation. We had our perspective, the referee had a different perspective and the camera had a third perspective. And once we took our perspective and combined that basically or informed that with the camera's perspective, it became obvious to us what the referee's perspective was. He saw what he saw and why he was certain as he was as certain as we were at that time about the results. It just so happened that his perspective was, let's say, more correct, I guess, or allowed him to see reality better than ours. Because we didn't realize that there was we didn't realize some things that were throwing off our perspective until we got another one. And so don't just don't assume that you're right and that you can just dive right in and go with it. Be open to those other perspectives because either they can help you understand and communicate to other people why their perspective is a little different from reality or those perspectives can open your eyes to a reality that you didn't think existed. That being said, I think we'll wrap this one up. I don't want to belabor it too long because it's just painful going back over all of this. That being said, we will return to these and we are going to continue going through some some mistakes and errors and missteps and all of that fun kind of stuff. But as always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. One more thing before you go. Develop a new podcast and site are a labor of love. Enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us be great, if you go out to developer.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.