Mechanics of a breakthrough.
‘Easy for him. He got lucky’ they said. I’ve heard friends and strangers say it too many times over the years.
It’s just the thing that luck tends to follow people who work hard and day by day tweak the odds to their favor. Until one day lady Fortune gazes favorably upon them.
Breakthrough never follows our instructions. It doesn’t come fast or cheap. And it has a stigma of first offering failures in formidable amounts.
Of course, the only way of failing for sure is to give up. Or refuse to try in the first place.
Human has a hard-coded tendency to avoid pain even though we know patience is the key almost every time.
Patience originates from the same word as patient and passion. The Latin origin points to suffering. Passio.
Patience means that we are ready to suffer before reaching our goals. It means that we pay the price of the breakthrough full out and up front. And then we still need that small pinch luck to push through.
Breakthroughs have yet another tendency. In the end, they tend to take us by surprise. Around 10–18 months after the epic failure to be more accurate. But to get there, we must learn the one winning method, which can take us past the finish line.
Actions are the only way to get results.
That is why the skill of getting started is the first and the most important one. Breakthrough is an inevitable consequence of patiently starting every day until.
I’m trying to write about software testing here, but for some reason, it seems we end in philosophical discussions instead. Still, someone might ask what does this have to do with testing?
Well. Let me elaborate. If you want a breakthrough, you first need to fall in love with the dance of starting, trial and error. Then you need to add in a load of patience.
And finally, comes testing. Testing is work to tweak the odds to your favor. It is a tool to shrink the impact of failures. And sometimes even see them early enough to avoid.
Once we understand the mechanics of a breakthrough, time and probability start playing our game. And later, others call it luck when we’re done.
