Expect to make mistakes

Over the Christmas and New Year holiday I took a long break from work and I did a bit of sewing to mend some of my clothes. The highlight of which was when I sewed on a patch and inadvertedly sewed the legs of my trousers together!

I’ve only ever done a bit of sewing in the past, and have never had any training on it so things were a bit slow. I’d seen my mum, a seamstress, sew on a machine at rapid speed and always assumed that’s what ‘sewing’ was but with the benefit of YouTube I was able to find sewing videos that advocated going slowly and the videos too could be watched at a slower pace (or I could make them slower - one video I got down to the lowest speed just to follow and I had to watch that several times to get the technique!). Searching for help I found a great video on What I’d wished I’d know when I first started sewing and it was so helpful, for sewing and, I think, for coding.

I guess it’s not really a surprise that there is a link between craft activities like sewing with coding. In RStudio the RMarkdown button to render the script is a ball of wool with needles and you knit; you can even purl to take an RMarkdown to an R script. Searching for knitting and coding gives a lot of results on how the two are closely linked with interesting stories like spies using knitting to hide secret codes and quotes like:

“People like Grace Hopper were very consciously mobilizing gender stereotypes to get women in,” Abbate says. Programming, some argued, was similar to knitting, sewing, or even crossword puzzles, so women were a perfect fit.

https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued

But aside from the analogies between the craft activity and abstract coding there is a lot we can learn from just learning something new. The video mentions the crucial thing of “making mistakes” which is such a hard thing to accept, as a professional and particularly working in data. Making mistakes feels actively discouraged in schools where getting a tick gives you the dopamine hit and then you often move on, but it’s the mistakes where we can really learn. They stick in our heads, possibly because they are attached to more powerful and uncomfortable emotions like embarrassment or shame. Ironically that make the learning deeper and, over time, those feelings will hopefully wane with the learning staying longer. Being comfortable with struggle and frustration is not easy and, in fact, it’s probably not right even say “comfortable”; tolerant is perhaps better.

The fallacy of full marks

We tell our children now that making mistakes is a good thing, it’s a sign of a growth mindset but that doesn’t mean people innately appreciate that. I know children who instinctively want to get things right, not because they’ve been expected to, just because they understand the relevance of getting fullness of anything. If they understand percentages they soon learn 100% is the goal but what is harder to shift is that it can be counter intuitive. Even aduls get lured into thinking 100% is a good think but in data analysis I’m very often suscipious of the 100% targets in KPIs. They are either unachievable or unsustainable.

I once worked in an IT service company that supported the IT infrastructure for a large food company. They had a really old mainframe computer that had run for years and at 100% availability which I felt was too good to be true so I questioned it. I was told it had always been 100%, it was stable and reliable, not to worry. It failed that week and I felt like I’d somehow caused that failure by merely questionning it (what power!). But these things happen. Old machines just have to have their power cable nudged and they break so we have to have contingencies for those events, not ignore them because they have “always worked”.

We make mistakes and we learn so perhaps instead of fearing those mistakes (to the point we don’t take perceived risks) we should fear the lack of contingency when things will inevitably go wrong or fail.

Update on the sewing

I got the patch on after twice sewing the legs together so now I’m an expert unpicker of stitches!

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay