RWDevCon 2016 Inspiration Talk – Embracing Failure by Janie Clayton

Advice from My Own Experiences

I want to talk a little bit about a couple of pieces of advice that I have from my own failures. Now unfortunately, failing is incredibly painful.

In the original version of this talk, I was talking about the worst day of my life, which happened in 2008. I was going to school for audio engineering, video editing and other stuff after going to school to get a journalism degree. I’d spent about 10 years and 60 thousand dollars going to school trying to pursue this career.

In one day all of that was gone. My career was gone, all my network was gone. Everything was just completely gone. It was a really horrible, painful experience that I never want to go through ever again.

I learned so much from that experience that I decided to write this talk. It was such a horrible, painful experience. I learned all of these things that I knew I never wanted to deal with ever again.

For some reason we remember painful things a little bit better than we remember things that were successful and things that made us happy. Failing is a good thing because, if you think about it properly, you can really learn a lot of stuff about yourself and how to avoid having to deal with this painful stuff in the future.

Anything that you do is going to be difficult at first.

I don’t know how many people have not actually been programming for very long, but I haven’t been programming for very long. I talk to people who’ve been programming since they were seven and they don’t remember that programming used to be hard.

When you first start off, you’re really slow and there’s a bunch of stuff that you don’t know, but you don’t think about it. Then as you get better and better, you start getting faster. Then eventually things get better.

Tip #1: Practice Is Necessary

Nobody is born being able to do something like this.

This takes a lot of time and work and dedication. We just see the end result. You need to be aware of the fact that when you first start out with something, you’re not going to be like this, but you can get to be this skilled if you work really hard and you are focused and willing to work through all of the pain and the Cliffs of Confusion and the Desert of Despair.

Tip #2: What You Do Doesn’t Define You

We also need to stop trying to find something that’s going to define us.

I have heard of all of these problems in the last couple of years with gamer gate, where you have these people who have adopted the persona of thinking of themselves as a gamer. They don’t think of gaming as something that they enjoy doing. It’s just who they are.

That causes a lot of problems, especially when you’re in online communities of people. Then people can’t give you advice about how you can be better at what you do because you confuse what you’re doing with who you are. Every time somebody tells you that you could be making your code more efficient, you take it as a personal attack because you completely adopted that as your persona.

You don’t have your nice patronus out there that can absorb all of the negative energy that you’re getting from people. You have no buffer because you have decided to identify yourself with what it is that you’re doing.

It’s really important to try to get away from that mindset so that you can be a happier person and be able to accept that sometimes you’re going to do something that doesn’t quite work out.

Tip #3:Don’t Compare Yourself With Others

We also need to stop comparing ourselves to other people.

As Vicky mentioned in my bio, I spent a year working for Brad Larson. Brad Larson is the creator of GPUImage, he’s a moderator on Stack Overflow and he had one of the first video series on iOS development before raywenderlich.com really got big.

He’s been programming for 30 years. I’ve been programming for 3 years. I was working with him and I kept comparing myself to him because I thought he was really cool.

We have people in our community that we think are really cool and want to be like them, but we have to acknowledge that we’re all different people. We have different experiences and we’ve been doing things for different periods of time.

I would get really frustrated and depressed because I knew that I was never going to be as good as Brad. I actually had a discussion with another developer, Jeff Biggus, where I was telling him about how I felt like a failure because I was working for this genius guy and I just felt stupid.

Jeff just looked at me. He’s like, “Do you remember what you were doing last year? Last year you were unemployed. Last year you were doing your first conference talk, you were just getting started out and now you have a book. You’re working for Brad. You’ve done a dozen conference talks. Everybody in the community knows who you are. Look at how far you’ve come in the last year.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way because I was so busy comparing myself to the people that I admired and wanted to be like, that I didn’t think about who I used to be. If you told me 3 years ago I’d be doing this, I would have thought, “Nah. There’s no way.”

One of the reasons why I talk about all of this stuff in the community is because there might be people out in the audience who compare themselves to me and go, “Oh, man. Janie, she’s only been doing this for a few years but she’s really successful. I’m never going to be.” I don’t want people to feel that way.

I want everybody to be able to be happy with what they’re doing on their own without comparing themselves to anybody else. I want everybody to feel okay with saying, “You know what? I’m going to learn something that’s really hard and I’m going to go for it. I’m not going to worry about how I compare to somebody else.”