This evening I attempted to make another small bowl. I am finding that with each attempt, even if unsuccessful, yields more experience and insight into the entire process. I am certainly no natural in that projects I attempt are mostly successful. I tend to have to learn the hard way with the majority of my early projects ending in failure.
The funny thing is that I do not mind this. I found as I did with startups, it is okay to fail, just do not repeat the same mistake over and over. At TripAdvisor, that was our mantra. Fail early, fail often, but do not repeat your failures. It made for a very successful environment when running a web startup. I find it also applies to turning.
It is interesting that I find myself humored when things go wrong in the shop. This manual work and thinking is very different from my experiences as a software developer and head of software engineering teams. Tonight, when I broke through the bottom of the bowl, my initial reaction was pretty straight forward: where did I go wrong? Learn from the mistake and move on.
The mistake I made was pretty simple – I did not measure the depth of my cuts corrects and ended up too close to the bottom of the bowl. When I went to separate I tore out the bottom of the bowl. Bummer, yes! End of the world? Nah. Lesson learned.
