On failure

"Bip - "

It was my tenth time to hear my robot breaking away from the same place of a map. I was exhausted because that code was to be the last possibility that should have made the robot to evade the obstacle it couldn't pass for the last 3 hours. I couldn't think of any other code to try. I felt like what Captain America would have felt if Dr. Strange's the only way to save earth from Thanos was actually wrong. Maybe today was just an unlucky day. Feeling so frustrated, I packed my stuff and headed to the subway boarding home.

Subway was my favorite place to refresh myself and come up with original ideas. Ever since I was an elementary school student, I took the subway to go to school and to come back home. On those daily excursions of about 30 minutes, I enjoyed contemplation that no one could interrupt. On the train, apathy was the only sharing of passengers, and in that indifference, I could separate my feelings and rationally think about the problems I faced. I felt completely free and alone in the center of a train full of people, ironically.

I trudged to the station and got on to the subway, expecting the time in the subway would solve the robot's problem. As the train accelerated, I began to throw some questions. Was the robot too fast? Or did it turned too slow? However, I couldn't really concentrate on those issues as usual, because the words my father used to say as a habit suddenly started to buzz in my head.

"Don't waste your time on useless things and try one thing right."

He thought doing some robotics stuff was time-wasting. In his realistic view, it was much better to have a stable job like a doctor than taking a risk to be a tech start-up man or a research worker. He explained to me that unless if I can't be the best like Dennis Hong, one of the most famous robotics researcher, my investment of time on robotics was useless.

I could understand what my father said because today's unsuccessful trials seemed to foretell the future failure of my tech start-up business. I wasn't able to get away from that worry. Apparently, I wanted to be a creator and make something new that didn't exist in the world before. However, I had nothing to say to my father when he asked me can I assure my success as a robotics researcher. After those speculations, today's unsuccessful trial came to me so uncomfortable, because I failed today, and I feared if I would fail again tomorrow.

A few months later, I happened to have a chance to hear a lecture from Dennis Hong. I was waiting for some explanations on his robot because his researches were the front-runner of robotics. It was intimidating to hear some of his top achievements. New technologies he created and his academic passion were incredible, but what made me so surprised came out when he started explaining his lab culture at the end of the lecture.

"In my lab, I demand students to brake the robots. That's our lab motto," He said. "Our students learned more things when they broke the robot. All the evolution I made came from that mindset," he said.

It was the exact thing that I had to say to my father! One failure didn't mean that I would also be defeated tomorrow. Yet, I couldn't get the way he retains passion even after a fiasco. When everything I tried didn't work, even I knew that someday I would make it work, it didn't know when would it be. I still feared to fail, and lethargy overwhelmed my mind. He should have failed far more time than me in making a robot, so he should have felt much more frustration than I had. In the Q&A session, I asked him a question.

"How do you overcome the frustration that failure gives?"

He smiled and answered, "Don't fear to fail. It's okay to fail because it always shows the next path."

At that moment, I realized that I don't have to fear of failing anymore. I had never failed - I was going one step further, while it was too slow so that I couldn't notice it. The concern that had bothered me was gone, and I phone-called my father.