A Study in Failure

Today, I was out playing in the snow with my daughter and 2 nieces.  A neighbor came by and made a huge snowball just by rolling it down the hill that we were by.  He inspired me to try to make an even bigger snowball!!

The First Failure:  This should be simple...
Seemed simple enough!  If he could make a snowball that big just rolling straight down the hill, just imagine how big I could make one if I started by going back and forth a few times at the top of the hill before rolling it down.  If I could make a 3 foot snowball at the top of the hill, just think how big it would get by the time it had rolled all the way down to the bottom of the hill!

Preparation...

Back and forth.  Back and forth.  Pretty quickly it got too big to hold back and so down the hill it went!  Bigger and bigger it got....  and then it broke into pieces half way down the hill; the largest one, no bigger than my head.

Fail!

Failure #2: We clearly need a stronger core!

Hmm....  obviously the first attempt had not been strong enough to survive the roll down the hill.  This time I would really pack the ball at the top to make sure I had a solid core.

So, I rolled and packed, rolled and packed (by lifting and gently back onto dropping it on the ground).  It got bigger - and it was definitely much stronger than before.  But by the time it got to be about 2 feet in size, it broke apart - even before I tried to roll it down the hill!

Fail.

Failures 3, 4 and 5:  No control of the rolling direction
Learning from this failure, I decided to try packing it by hand.  It was much slower going, but man was it packed tight!   By the time it got to be the same size as the first one, it was so solid it probably weighed more the twice as much!  It was like a rock.

In fact, it was so heavy that I realized it might actually get further if I could roll it across the hill - across a much gentler slope.  It would never get out of control and just think how big it would get...

So - we started to roll it, but gravity had other plans...

 Preparation - Actual Path (Fail) - Desired Path (gentle slope) 

Useless strengthening techniques
I had also spent almost 1/2 the time building the core:

1. Removing leaves from the outside (which I felt might be weakening the ball)
2. And leaving (or even adding) sticks, twigs, etc (which I felt might help to strengthen the ball)

While the final core did not break apart (certainly a successful improvement over previous attempts) the solution had not really assisted in achieving the stated goal and had probably just added weight, making it harder to push.

Unhelpful Success... (failure)

 

And... a relatively tiny snowball!
After all of that effort - almost 45 minutes of rolling and packing at the top of the hill, removing leaves and adding "fiber", and the resulting snowball was only about 3 1/2 feet in size.  Smaller than the original!

Fail!

What to do?
Having failed again and again to make a "big enough" snowball, I decided to take what I had learned and try once more.

I thought to myself - what if I didn't try to use the hill at all.  That way, I would never need a big, solid core to "survive" a run down the hill.  Instead, I could just try to make the lightest, fluffiest core possible - since just pushing it back and forth on a flat surface would never require it to be "strong".

So once again, I started to roll...  Relatively quickly it was bigger than any of our previous attempts. I needed help, and got it from my daughter, niece and... Brian, who had rolled the original snowball.

With all of us working together, we were able to build, and build and build and build - until it was too big to push anymore.  I think if we'd had more people - we probably could have made it even bigger.

The final snowball

Finally - success.  But success that was only possibly by pushing through, and learning from the five failures that had preceded it.