Designs are all around us, and will continue to be in the new year. New year, new design fails. As the world changes around us, one thing has a way of remaining true. People are fallible. We make mistakes, and we make them often. It’s one of the beautiful things about being a human. It humbles us all the time. We trot around all day trying not to mess up, and then boom. We mess up, and we mess up badly. We can’t help it. Sometimes we mess up so bad that it’s remarkable. We don’t mean to, but we do. Like that time we accidentally pulled on a door that said «push,» even though we definitely read the sign that said «push,» but we just couldn’t process it in time to meaningfully ingest that information. It has happened to me more times than I would care to admit. 

But the thing that matters is not that we make mistakes, because everyone does, but it’s how we react to them. It’s how we move forward in the face of failure. We can either let it get us down and take it as proof of our innate failure, or we can learn from it and move on. We were great at that as babies, once upon a time. The whole way we learn is by failing. We try something, and when it doesn’t work, we take that feedback and use it to further our understanding of the world. We could do more of that now.