Crash, Test, but No Dummy

Sometimes, the point is to fail. In fact, the point is sometimes to maximize failure.

When you roll that car frame down the rail towards the brick wall with the checkered mannequins inside, you’re not hoping they survive! You’re trying very hard to make that crash as spectacular as possible. If the test car doesn’t hit the wall hard enough to destroy the dummies inside, the engineers don’t go “Hooray, safe on the first try!”

If that happened, they’d know they failed at failing.

This is different from just the acceptance that some failure is inevitable on the path to success, so you try your best to win but you mentally prepare yourself to be okay with losing a bit first. No, this goes beyond that. This is saying, “Failure is inevitable on the path to success, and you learn the most from failure, so I should maximize the disasters in order to maximize the learning.”

If you want to learn about something, often the best way is through disaster. The brilliance of the crash test isn’t in trying to avoid failure, it’s in harvesting it. Going from “hunter/gatherers” of failure to failure agriculture. No more free-range failures! This is about manufacturing them, so that you can maximize your learning.

Those crash tests aren’t just throwing cars at walls. Besides the obvious features keeping all humans safe, there are about a thousand cameras, sensors, and other features designed to scale up the learning process. No humans are harmed, and we gather incredible volumes of data. That’s what you’re after. Safe, high-information catastrophes.

People often tell me that I’m very good at interviews; I hope so, because I train people how to interview well. Some of what I know I learned from formal training in HR & recruiting, and some I learned from intense reading on the topic. But you want to know how I learned most of what I know?

I purposely would apply to roles that I either wasn’t that interested in or thought were real long shots, and I’d be weird on purpose. I’d try very unusual approaches to my conversations or my prep. I’d pull the kinds of stunts that you only see in comedy sketches. One time I actually responded to the “How would you describe yourself” question with “employed here.”

Those were my crash tests. They were “safe” environments because nothing was on the line – but I learned an incredible amount about what kinds of stunts were “too much” and which ones actually landed. I learned about conversational flow, rapport, and negotiation. And I even got offered a few surprising roles along the way.

Finding a safe way to break something is an incredible way to learn about it. Go beyond just the acceptance of a little failure, and create some more on purpose. You will be amazed at how quickly you learn when you crash.