In today's episode, we talk about a truth of machine learning, and learning in general. I hope you walk away feeling more confident and less afraid of failure. Today's episode is sponsored by Rollbar. With Rollbar, you get the context, insights and control you need to find and fix bugs faster. Rollbar is offering Developer Tea listeners the Bootstrap Plan, free for 90 days (300,000 errors tracked for free)! Head over to [rollbar.com/developertea](https://rollbar.com/developertea) now for the free 90 day offer!
In today's episode, we talk about a truth of machine learning, and learning in general. I hope you walk away feeling more confident and less afraid of failure.
Today's episode is sponsored by Rollbar. With Rollbar, you get the context, insights and control you need to find and fix bugs faster. Rollbar is offering Developer Tea listeners the Bootstrap Plan, free for 90 days (300,000 errors tracked for free)! Head over to rollbar.com/developertea now for the free 90 day offer!
How is failure valuable? Everyone who listens to this show often enough, hopefully just had a little bit of a smile come across your face because you know that failure is incredibly valuable. My name is Jonathan Cutrell, you're listening to Developer Tea. In today's episode, we're going to talk about failure and more we're going to talk about learning and how failure plays into our learning mechanisms. Our natural way of learning and we're going to talk all about that. My job on this show and ultimately the reason I made this show is to help you as a developer become a better developer, become really better at what you do to become a smarter and more intuitive developer, but also to see the world in a new and expanded way, right, to level up in your career, truly level up in your career, not just get paid more and not just get a promotion, but rather become better at what you do and becoming better really is wrapped up in learning. This is something that is absolutely, you can't separate the two, right? If there are two things that will affect your career more than anything else and this is kind of a freebie, number one is relationships and number two is learning and really both of them are probably equal on that scale. There's not really great data to explain exactly which of those is more important than the other and which one has the biggest effect on your trajectory. Everyone has a different story, but pretty much everyone can attribute a large portion of their career to one or the other or both of these two things, relationships and learning. We're not going to be talking about relationships as much in today's episode, but we are going to be talking about failure. There is a part of our lives. It's built into the way we become better, right? This is something that we're very good at as species. We are also very afraid of failure and very often we sacrifice something incredibly important because of our fear of failure. So let's talk through maybe why we're afraid of failure. And I want you to think through the times when you've been most afraid and it's very difficult to identify this because it really is something that is so ingrained in us that we sometimes don't even realize that we're acting out of fear until we explicitly understand how that fear operates. Very often fear is not visible. It's not detectable by the person experiencing that fear because they are mitigating the fear. In other words, they're doing the thing that responds to fear and goes against the threat that the person is fearing. This is something that really comes from the earliest humans. We were afraid of loss. We were afraid of threats so much because a single threat could take us out. We're running away. We've talked about this a lot recently by the way, but we're running away from a predator, for example. That fear of loss drives that it drove us to do whatever we could to avoid that loss. In that scenario where you really are fighting for your life, that kind of scenario makes you extremely loss averse and you're seeking safety and you're identifying ways that you can become more safe. Very often this is why we settle. The word settle, we learn this word. As we grow older, we find something that's comfortable and that to our brains is the signal of safety. Here's the thing. If we are afraid of failure and we very often end up acting on that fear by shying away from failure, then we will also stagnate in our learning. We're going to take a quick sponsor break and I'm going to come back and kind of outline why learning is absolutely tied to failure. Why learning is impossible without failure. We're going to talk about that in just a moment. But first, when we talk about today's sponsor, Rollbar. Speaking of failures, you almost certainly have bugs that are lurking in your code. You can find those bugs. But let's talk about that for a second. You have bugs in code that is out and in the wild. It's deployed today and you don't know where those bugs are. If I asked you to go and find them, it may take you a long time to even understand where they are. But with Rollbar, you can find bugs that are lurking in your code. You can see what errors lurk in your code with Rollbar. We don't like this reality. We don't like to admit that bugs are in our code. But the sooner we do admit it, the better we can address the fact that they're there. Dealing with errors does really suck. It sucks much worse when you realize the error has been out there for a long time. The best thing that you can do is catch that error as early as possible. Otherwise, you're going to end up digging through logs or relying on users who are probably angry at that point to report those errors to you. Rollbar works with all major languages and frameworks and you can start tracking production errors in minutes. You can integrate Rollbar into your existing workflow using things like Slack or HipChat to get alerts. In real time, you can also link your source code in GitHub or Bitbucket or GitLab. You can turn errors automatically into issues in Gira and Pivotal Tracker or turn into a card in Trello. Some of their customers, by the way, include Heroku, Twilio, Kayak, Instacards, and Desk and Twitch. So you know that this product has been tested by very large teams. It's been validated. It's been run through its databases. Go and check out the offer that Rollbar is providing to Developer Tea. Listeners. Rollbar.com slash Developer Tea. Rollbar.com slash Developer Tea. You'll get the bootstrap plan for free if you go to that link. Once again, rollbar.com slash Developer Tea. Thank you again to Rollbar for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So we're talking about failure. Why failure is important for learning and not only is it important, but it is kind of core, fundamental in the architecture of learning. Because if you think about what learning really is, it is gaining information. That is usable. It's deployable. You're gaining information that you can recall later. That is deployable. You're going to actually be able to recall it and do something with it. And that gaining of information requires a source of information. It requires that you have some level of validation of information. Now this isn't something I've made up. Some very smart people are actively using this reality of learning every day in machine learning. So a basic core tenant of many machine learning algorithms is allowing the machine to take a guess of what it thinks the right answer is. And then telling the machine when it was wrong or when it was right, that moment where I tell the machine when it was wrong or when it was right, that is the moment of failure. But it also happens to be the moment of success. Moreover, it is also the moment where information is gathered. So this is a critical moment, the feedback moment where our assumptions are validated or invalidated. And we have a success or failure as well as information that we feed back into our mind. That information that moment is when you learn. So our fear of failure is inversely proportional to our ability to learn. We have to constantly act in opposition to our fear of failure if we want to continue learning. So I want you to practice this and continue to remind yourself that the things that your brain is telling you about failure are very often exaggerated. You no longer live in a world where failure ultimately means death. You're not being chased by predators every day. This is an extremely uncommon scenario for most people in today's world. So most of the time we exaggerate what failure will do to us and we grossly under exaggerate or exaggerate how little failure's importance is. And we grossly underestimate how important that learning is to our lives and to our trajectory in our career. So I want you to embody this concept, really mull it over in your mind each and every day understand what failures you experience that day and how you're learning from those. And ultimately give yourself some space to fail. Even computers can't learn without failure. That's an epiphany that I want you to carry away today. Even computers can't learn without failure. So you shouldn't expect yourself to learn without failure. Nor should you should you expect yourself to not fail at all. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope you've been inspired by it. And I hope you'll check out today's sponsor, Rollbar. This is going to help you find errors that are lurking in your code right this second. They're out there and they're waiting to strike. So go ahead and get started with Rollbar today. You can get it integrated very quickly. However to rollbar.com slash Developer Teaou can get the bootstrap plan for free. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you subscribe if you don't want to miss out on future episodes and until next time, enjoy your tea.