okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Does failure breed new knowledge?
Of all things, I read a bit of a story in the business section of the NY Times about predicting success of entrepreneurs. New businesses usually fail, so some researchers looked at whether people were learning from mistakes and doing better in the future. Here's a quote from one of those researchers:
"Does failure breed new knowledge or experience that can be leveraged into performance the second time around?" he asks. In some cases, yes, but over all, he says, "We found there is no benefit in terms of performance."
That's interesting. And, of course, it reminds me of orienteering. Certainly the conventional wisdom (and it does make a lot of sense) is to analyze your booms and learn from them. I'm a proponent of spending more time analyzing non-booms and trying to learn from them, but I'm just as guilty as any other orienteer of focusing on my mistakes. I have to force myself to focus more time looking at what went right (though it has gotten easier over the years). Control Picking Course
Check out Jon Pedersen's control picking from a Norwegian training camp in France. Crazy terrain (Fontainebleau, I think).
