Why do projects fail or succeed and what is failure anyway?
Of course there are lots of reasons why projects fail, but if you boil down any project which seemed amazing but ultimately resulted in nothing, to its core there are almost always the same reasons.
First and foremost is lack of passion. If you don’t have your heart behind it, you will find that its easy to get discouraged. It takes many conversations, many frustrations, and many failures to get a project into a presentable state. If the project is self-guided you’re guaranteed to spend many days wondering what to do next, knowing you’re stuck without a clue as to why or where you’re stuck, and butting heads with teammates. Passion for the project means that when you fail at something your desire to succeed outweighs your ego so that you are able to see what you did wrong and then improve on it. Passion helps channel the disciple to wait out the period of misery to try again with a clear head and a better plan (100 times over over many many months or years).
Second, you have to care about the user and/or the team (if you’ve found great people with passion), not the actual idea or project. Why? Because chances are, the idea is crappy. In my project from Advanced Design my teammates and I found a really great problem. Several doctors, papers, and forums told us that! We won a lot of money and prizes with our idea! However as we continued to interview more patients we realized that our device had a serious, unfixable flaw: for the patients who needed our device, there was almost no way our device idea would work while for the patients on whom it would work it wasn’t very useful. Switching projects was very rough for the team. Half of the members left, we had to start interviewing all over again, lots of headache for everyone. Now we are back in full swing. We also got to keep the grant money, the learning, the project management structure and the advisors as we developed the new project.
So what is success? Based on my experiences success comes right after total miserable failure. Its when, after feeling pained that you didn’t think ahead, spend enough time, and (insert verb which made you fail), you finally figure out what you need to do to not fail in the same way again and consequently have the discipline to follow through with your plan. This is why it’s so rare for people’s first or second projects to be any good. You have to first figure out all the things you will fail at and ways around the failure before your projects will be successful.
*Note: you might need to try different kinds of projects to find what you’re passionate about. However if you’re never able to wait out the misery in your projects and you’ve already tried a few different one, the problem is your discipline and you need to work on it!
BME Design 