Your Stories
We would like to hear from you about your failures and what you learned from them. So, be brave, submit an entry below and share your experiences with others! A good format for your story might be to divide it into three sections. First, give a summary of the failure, then specify the pain/cost involved, and finally what you learned. We are looking for productive failures here.
We will probably end up using some of these stories in a future book, presentations, etc., so by submitting your stories here you agree to let us freely use your story and also promise that it is your authentic story and that you didn't illegally copy it from somewhere else.
SAMPLE STORY
Failure:
When creating this web site I spent a lot of time fiddling with SquareSpace templates when I could have asked for help and delegated this work to someone else.
Pain:
I lost sleep working crazy hours and didn't go to the gym to maintain my workout schedule.
Learning:
In the long run, my productivity is best served by sticking to a steady rythm and taking care of myself.
Frode Odegard
Failure:
I was unable to detect when an embedded SWF file had stopped playing in a recent Flash project. I needed to trigger an animation in an unrelated movie clip when it was done and using the EnterFrame event seemed an inelegant solution.
Pain:
I lost half a day trying different techniques and then lost the rest trying to get custom events working.
Learning:
I finally got my custom events firing properly and triggering what they needed to. I now know exactly how to use custom events in Actionscript 3.0 (which has always eluded me) and can continue the work on my current project.