Fail Until You Succeed

It's Patch Day for World of Warcraft. Patch 7.2 is now live, so I'm going to spend some time this evening enjoying all the new stuff on offer. Yes, there's bound to be bugs and other errors that make this less than perfect, but that's far better than the old days of not being able to play at all on Patch Day.

Blizzard's dev team for WOW gets a lot of shit, much deserved, but the fact is that the game today is much better than it was 10 years ago. Some of that is due to personnel turnover, some due to technological improvements, but the bulk of it comes from learning the hard way what works and what doesn't- and then maintaining that collective knowledge across shifts in the team's composition.

It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be to be effective or relevant. Sucking less is both a means and an end, and doubly-desirable accordingly. The WOW team sucks less now than it did during the days of The Burning Crusade, and while they've been having significant problems since Cataclysm the current state of the game is looking to be an overall improvement and hopeful of an upward trend in quality (and thus player population) that can restore the heights seen during Wrath of the Lich King.

You are no different. You too can benefit from the self-reflection upon your mistakes required to learn from them; this is why "Fail Faster" works once you (a) can recognize when you dun goofed soon enough to bail when it's not that painful and (b) you are able to survive the consequences of failure. (Being humble enough to know that this happens to even the best, so it's no blemish on you, helps a lot.) You'll have ups and downs, as each lesson disrupts the state of your knowledge so far, but if you hold to it the overall trend is upward. The catch? Where you arrive may not be anywhere that you thought it would be.