Why I'm grateful for the experiments that failed

[Tim]

My first semester of chemistry, everything failed. Every experiment. Every week. I thought I was bad at science. I thought I should quit.

I didn't.

I kept going. I kept failing. I kept writing about what happened. I kept trying to understand.

I learned to troubleshoot. I learned to check my equipment. To check my steps. To ask for help. To try again.

I learned that failure is data. When an experiment fails, it tells you something. Maybe the method doesn't work. Maybe the equipment is broken. Maybe you misread the instructions. That's information. That's useful.

I learned to be honest. I stopped pretending. I stopped smoothing my data. I started writing what happened. My reports got better. Not the grades. The learning.

I learned that I can do hard things. I thought I was bad at science. I'm not. I'm just learning. Failure is part of learning.

I'm not afraid anymore. I used to dread lab. Now I'm curious. What will go wrong? What will I learn? How will I fix it?

My friend asked: “Aren't you frustrated?”

Sometimes. But I'm also grateful. The experiments that worked taught me what I already knew. The ones that failed taught me something new.

 

[Sarah]

We have a saying: "Fail fast, fail often, fail forward." You just discovered it on your own.

The experiments that work are boring. You learn nothing new. The experiments that fail? That's where the learning happens. That's where you figure out what you didn't know you didn't know.

I kept a "failure log" during my PhD. Every failed experiment, I wrote down: what I tried, what happened, what I thought went wrong, what I'd try next. That log was more valuable than my successful data. It showed my thinking. It showed my growth.

Your post is that log. Keep writing. Keep failing. Keep learning. You're not bad at science. You're doing science. Real science. The messy kind. The kind that actually advances knowledge.