Through my headphones came a familiar roar.
Never having heard it that early before, I looked at the clock confused.
6:04. “Huh. Then it couldn’t be…”
My half-thought hung in the air, as I looked through the gym doors in time to see the street sweeper thunder past.
It took a second to register, but my heart sank a little as I realized it was sweeping up cigarette butts, windblown plastic bags and crushed Starbucks cups (yay!) on the side of the street I had parked (boo!).
Not wanting to start my day bummed out, I reframed it.
“Wellllll, I hope Mayor Breed puts my 84 dollars to good use,” I unconvincingly thought.
Jeff Bezos’s Two Types of Failure
Funnily enough, I was reading Jeff Bezos’s book, Invent and Wander on the treadmill.
And seconds before this all happened, I read the chapter about the two types of failure.
The good kind he calls “experimental failure.”
The bad kind he calls “operational failure.”
Experimental Failure
This the failure you get when you’re trying new things. If you don’t try new things, you don’t grow. And if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
But if you try new things, you will fail. So experimental failure is good because it signals growth.
Operational Failure
This is the failure where you should have known better. You’ve made this mistake before, you didn’t learn from it, and you’ve done it again.
The first mistake is an experimental failure. If you make the same mistake after that, then it’s an operational failure and shouldn’t have happened.
My $84 donation
Since I just started driving up to the gym this week, I’m going to call this morning an experimental failure.
Who knew that street cleaning started at 6am on Chestnut St. when it’s 9am around the rest of the neighborhood?
But if I make another $84 involuntary donation, that’s clearly an operational failure.
And that would be a lousy start to my day.
But this morning was just an experimental failure and a lesson learned. (I hope.)
