It’s Always Your Fault
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Unfortunately we often talk about bad luck when there was a great chance of it going wrong and it goes wrong.
David Heinemeier Hansson mentioned something during an interview with Tim Ferris that really challenged me. It’s the concept of “It’s Always Your Fault”.
He explains how helpful it can be to look at situations as systems or feedback loops and recognize that you’re part of all the systems you’re part of. He uses Basecamp as a prime example:
“I‘m in some way part of everything that goes on. Whether I’m involved in a project or not involved in the project, I set up some of the outlines, I set up some of the frameworks. I helped create some of the culture that led to what happened.”
DHH does car racing and talks about teams who love attributing things to being just bad luck. Sometimes you genuinely have bad luck, which means there’s a very low percent chance of something going wrong and it goes wrong anyway.
Unfortunately we often talk about bad luck when there was a great chance of it going wrong and it goes wrong. That’s not bad luck. That’s bad planning, design or bad whatever. In other words “That’s Your Fault.”
If we write it off as bad luck we escape some of the pain of accepting our complicity but we also don’t learn anything. Failing to learn means we’re not going to make any improvements. This is a terrible cycle because iterative improvement is the key to good luck.