Well hello all. Here it is, blog post numbero uno. After discovering the surprising complexities of learning whether you have deep attention (A.K.A: concentrating on one singular thing at a time) or a hyper attention (A.K.A can multitask, and learn all of this deep meaningful stuff in a lecture and text people and talk about fairly meaningless things at the same time), it raises a serious question. Which types of learning can ensure failure is not only discouraged but avoided? I mean sure, it would be nice to have some sort of formula which meant that you were inept from any sort of failure. But then, even if you are the old school deep attention thinker or the multi tasking hyper attention thinker, could you actually learn anything without failing? We all would like to avoid epic fails videos on YouTube but how can we know if failing is actually going to help us, or define us?

Lets look at fiction, lets see what the hero does. Luke Skywalker, you could say would be your ‘new hope’ hyper attention thinker with learning the ways of the force and thinking of way to defeat a certain Darth Vader and on top of these conundrums, save his non-jedi friends. He impulsively decides that instead of becoming a full on Jedi Master, as perhaps a deep attention learner should do, he should cut things short and try and do all 3 things at once. Cutting a long and extremely entertaining story short, he loses his hand, Vader escapes and one of Luke’s friends is captured A.K.A. he didn’t succeed. But did he fail? NO. He picked himself up, got a new hand and tried again, but this time was able to accomplish all 3 of his ambitions. He could have given up and cried his life away in Cloud City, but he realised that’s not how life worked. Is that a testament to the hyper learning method? Or is it a testament to the importance of failing?

Lets look at somebody real. Thomas Edison. We all know the story. He was in the lightbulb industry. But of course, he only got to the first durable lightbulb by trying somewhere over one thousand times to make it work. This is probably what you could call a deep attention thinker, although he probably had a lot more on his mind. What did he think of the number of attempts? He saw it as not failure, but a journey. And thats the reality of failing, in that whatever way you happen to think and in whatever way you happen to live your life, the human truth is that you won’t always succeed. The effort you give, the talent you have can only go so far. What truly makes Luke and good old Tom heroes in their respective fields of the Force and inventing stuff is not that they got it all right at once, its that they did indeed fail at some point, but picked themselves up and kept going.

So there you go all. A lesson in life. There indeed, based on these two random case studies, is no formula to not failing by learning one way or another, and it should perhaps stay that way. Because failing is just another step in the journey to succeeding, and one of the most important ways to learn. So however you may be feeling and however you are thinking, just know that the perhaps the greatest failure would not be to fail at whatever it is you may be doing, but to not pick yourself up and keep going. So to answer your question, whether failing is good or bad, the answer is good, as it’s just another step in the  journey.