The question of consequences is real. I graduated in 2008 at the beginning of the great recession, and I watched some of my classmates go off and do startups. I asked them 'Dude, what if you fail?!' and one of them just shrugged his shoulders and said he'd move back home with his parents, and get a job at his dad's company. No big deal.

That's when I realized it was much easier to take those risks when you knew you had a safety net to fall back on and you didn't have to worry about winding up homeless sleeping under an overpass.

This is pretty much the framework I teach admins at work:

- What impact does the change have?

- How do you get out of that change, and how long does that take?

- And what is your confidence into the change, and the bail-out plan?

And honestly, if you have a high-confidence, fast bailout plan, you can be downright brazen/#yolo about changes. We've recently had to update a central and critical IDP, but we eventually realized: We have the old docker images, and it has a 200MB sized DB. We can dump + restore that in 2 minutes. So if the upgrade goes wrong, we have high confidence to rollback in like 5 minutes. At such a point.. why not just go with it?

Similar things are developing with Postgres upgrades. Setup 1 leader + 3 replicas, upgrade 2 replicas, failover, see how much explodes and at worst, fall back. If we can test beforehand, alright.

Other teams plan complicated upgrades requiring coordinated actions of 6 other teams. And like 3 know how to possibly take back that change? And like 4 know what to actually do? Ugh, this ended up in a fun weekend.

> If the difference between failing and succeeding is minimal in your life, burn the bridges!

The author’s analogy was about burning ships, not bridges, but your quote about burning bridges reminds me of related scenario I’m seeing more frequently among young people I’ve mentored: The idea that burning bridges is not a big deal because there are always more opportunities.

I’m in a big Slack where people come to ask for advice on tech careers. An alarming number of questions in recent years are from people who want to leave their jobs with a bang: Quitting without notice, intentionally making things difficult for their successor, unloading their grievances with specific people as they leave, posting big angry messages on the company Slack on their last day, and other ill-advised ideas.

They’re always disappointed when the Slack unanimously tells them it’s a bad idea to intentionally burn bridges like that. I guess it’s not until later in your career that you realize the value of being able to call on old managers and coworkers for referrals or job opportunities. They see leaving a job as the last time they’ll ever see any of those people. We have to remind them every time that networking is important and therefore they don’t want to leave a lasting negative impression on a place where they spent years building a reputation. Just do your two weeks notice and quietly exit.

Tangential, but it comes up enough in these scenarios about taking on new risks that I thought I’d mention it.

> If failure means you lose your one chance in your life of completing a marathon, be conservative

Strongly disagree here. There are many marathons. Push yourself as hard as you can. Worst case, you miss and can’t attempt again. But you had fun and have plenty of other things you can do with your time and physique.

"Fail" is by definition to be unsuccessful on one's goal.

It can literally mean my cake burned in the oven or my company loses millions of dollars.

Consequences are irrelevant.

I interpreted the "spectacular" part of the fail a bit differently.

The author had options to either 1) try for right at 3 hours, and either succeed or fail, or 2) push harder, get a much better time, and perhaps succeed but risk putting himself in a state where he did not finish at all. The failure to finish at all due to the extra reach is the spectacular fail referred to.

I agree. Fail only applies when talking about losing your ability to house, cloth, and feed yourself (and your family). Otherwise, it is just play-acting at failure.

> I think people are using the word "fail" a little too much.

The issue is when it's combined with "spectacularly".

As in: "I spectacularly failed at boiling my eggs. I let them boil for 7 minutes instead of 6 minutes 30. What a spectacular fail".

But nobody gives a flying f--k about my failed eggs.

Good suggestion. I think that my pre-race fueling strategy was better than previous races, but certainly lots of room for further improvement!

Shout out for Slow Horses, one of the best shows on TV.

      “So you're in charge of the rejects.” 
   “They don't like being called that.” 
      “What do you call them?” 
   “The rejects.” -- Jackson Lamb