If At First You Don’t Succeed…
This week was a week of fails. Lemme tell you about my first one.
So I’m a noob motorcyclist. And although I’ve taken a motorcycle safety course and have practiced in a parking lot and have been really careful, I still have A LOT to learn. Well, the other day, I was out riding with my friend who has significantly more experience than me and we found ourselves stopped on a particularly steep hill, trying to turn left. We were at the front of the line and luckily there wasn’t a ton of traffic (for LA), but I was still nervous. Although I had practiced how to start/stop on hills in a parking garage, this was my first real attempt at a “real” hill. In traffic. On a steep hill (I checked the grade and it’s about 16%). I knew that in order to successfully accomplish this task, I needed to use my rear break to hold me in place, feather the clutch and throttle, and then gradually ease off the rear break to go forward. This means actively using all four limbs at once. My left side would control the clutch and keep my balance while my right was the throttle and rear break. Unless you’ve practiced a lot, this can be a lot to manage all at once. It’s like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach while tap dancing. All at once. In traffic.
As we sat waiting for the light to turn green, I tried to take deep breaths and think about everything that I needed to accomplish. Clutch in, easy throttle, ease off clutch, slowly release rear break, gradually apply more throttle. And then the light turned green. And I stalled. And instead of calmly restarting my bike and trying again, I started to panic. The social anxiety of holding up traffic and watching my riding partner ride away started to get to me. I’m pretty sure I was yelling over our comms and he kept trying to calmly walk me through the next steps. But I was too panicked. I went instantly from the red zone into the brown zone.
So I tried again and I thought, this time I need more throttle since I didn’t move forward (I had completely forgotten about the rear break at this point). And then when I realized I wasn’t moving forward because of my rear break, I released the rear break, popped the clutch, and instantly went into a wheelie which then of course freaked me out. So then rather than pulling in the clutch and recovering, I started to whiskey throttle and wheelied AGAIN! Which then turned into a death spiral and I whiskey throttled and wheelied a third time. At this point I was fully out of control, the front wheel came down at an angle and I fell off the bike.
Luckily, my friend was able to come back almost instantly. Traffic saw my great wheelie adventure and stopped. People came out to help me. I was unhurt (thank you gear!), and I didn’t even bang up my bike that badly. I did everything wrong in that scenario but luckily everything around me went perfectly right.
Looking back, I can see exactly where I messed up and why, and where I need to practice. I wasn’t confident in the muscle memory and I let social anxiety rule instead of safety. So yesterday I went back to a parking garage and did hill drills for probably 20 min. And I’m going to keep doing drills until I feel confident on those, then gradually increase the grade of the hill until I can successfully do that damn intersection again.
After the motorcycle debacle, I found myself struggling with Git and GitHub, essential tools I need to master if I’m going to be a successful programmer. It’s one of those things that at first glance appears so simple. It’s really only a handful of core commands that you need to know. And yet, the ocean of Git knowledge is absolutely enormous. This simple project that I worked on this past week took me 3 tries before I successfully accomplished it. And I’m not talking about basic bug fixes that I needed to just resolve. I had messed up so badly that I needed to completely restart the project. THREE TIMES! (Also keep in mind, this is just one project out of many in this tiny 5 hour course that has now taken me significantly longer than 5 hours to work through and I’m still not done with it but I digress…)
These experiences, while humbling, embarrassing, and potentially dangerous, underscore a timeless adage: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. For me, adopting a growth mindset has been crucial, turning each setback into a foundational block for progress. I’m frequently reminded of the line from Macklemore’s Ten Thousand Hours: “The greats weren’t great because at birth they could paint/The greats were great because they paint a lot”. Whether it's finessing a motorcycle up a steep hill or successfully navigating Git commands, the journey to go from novice to expert is only through persistent effort and repetitive practice. This week's failures remind me that the path to proficiency is rarely linear, yet each attempt, each fall, brings invaluable lessons. It's through these cycles of trial, error, and trying again that we gradually improve. The essence of learning is not in avoiding failure or setbacks, but in rising each time we fall, and this time with newfound insight on how to improve.
So this next week, I’m gonna go work on those hills. And also those Git commands. What are you gonna go work on?
