Find a cheap way to try!

I've spent a lot of time thinking about failure, and how the fear of failure so frequently prevents people from trying things.  Weeks or months can be spent debating the various ways that an idea might fail when a prototype could potentially be developed in days that would answer the question conclusively.

I recently watched a TED talk by Regina Dugan from DARPA - with a message about the amazing things that we can accomplish when we stop fearing failure.  One of the things that she kept mentioning, and it wasn't until this morning that I realized how important it was, was how little was known before a test, and how much additional knowledge was gained by trying - even when the attempt results in failure.

For example, when Chuck Yeager made the first Mach 1 flight - Mach 0.8 was apparently the best wind tunnel data available at that point.  Leaving the sheer courage necessary to climb into that cockpit aside for the moment, because he tried - they learned more about supersonic flight that day than in all of the previous testing/theoretical work that had been done up to that point ... combined.  

In example after example, she kept coming back to how much they learned the first time that they tried to fly Mach 20, or from the first prototype mechanical humming bird that they built (even though it only flew for seconds).  Trying, even if it results in what appears to be complete and total failure, almost always yields so much additional information about the problem being attempted, that failure can simply be categorized as an irrelevant side effect of the learning process.  Failing 10 times is fine with me, if those 10 failures lead to success - which lasts forever.