A lot of this might sound a lot like petty schadenfreude, but seeing other people screw up and having to deal with the c

UX says that the onus of a user mistake should not be on the user but on the experience of the product or service. If I screw up, it’s pretty useless for me to put everything on myself. Beating myself up doesn’t lead to anything good, be it my own mental state or future users’ experiences. Instead, I should diagnose what exactly went wrong as well as what actionable improvements might allow me and others to avoid it in the future.,Even after I logically understand why mistakes are natural and I should not blame myself for making them, I can’t help thinking that bad things keep happening because I’m always screwing up. Existing societal pressures to ‘do better’ and ‘not mess up’ are always at play, and my depression monster uses these punish me.,As for me, at the end of the day, I’m just one person with a limited range of influence. I need to stop pitting myself against such an unrealistic standard because that pressure feeds the vicious circle of social pressure -> failure.,Said another way, long term steady state FCF will likely be the at the same level for many e-commerce, videogame and streaming media companies as it would have been before Covid. This is not to say that Covid did not increase their value; it did but primarily by pulling their financials forward a few years which obviously matters in a DCF. Whereas long term steady state FCF will likely be significantly higher for category leading brick and mortar retailers who had reasonably strong e-commerce businesses coming into Covid. Especially so for those category leading retailers who operate in inflationary categories where inventory turns are less important than they are in deflationary categories where e-commerce only companies have structural cost advantages due to faster inventory turns.,The only way to reduce the incidence of errors is to admit their existence, to gather together information about them, and thereby to be able to make the appropriate changes to reduce their occurrence… Rather than stigmatize those who admit to error, we should thank [them] and encourage the reporting. We need to make it easier to report errors, for the goal is not to punish but to determine how it occurred and change things so that it will not happen again.,Nobody ever plans to fail. Everybody wants to succeed when performing an action because there is no reward for messing up. When failure does occur, we recognize that this is Not A Good Thing™ for us and immediately switch to damage control mode. This shows up as excuses, defensiveness, and finger-pointing. In our mortification, how do we stop making failure all about us and instead learn to expand our vision to see what other factors were at play?,Furthermore, the presence of user failure is actually an important warning sign of a deeper problem. A true worst-case scenario happens when a deep problem goes unnoticed for a long time, only to blow up with catastrophic consequences in the future. Uncovering these problems via testing is a critical part of building a solution.,Truly world-breaking accidents don’t just happen because of one single incident. These things happen because the dominos were already (unfortunately) set up in such a way as to fall to disastrous effect. We can’t pin the blame entirely on the shoulders of that one unlucky person who knocked down that first domino. Instead, we should look toward the subsequent pieces to determine why they ended up in such vulnerable positions.,Instead of attempting change, it’s much easier to avoid cognitive dissonance by denying the existence of a broken system and labeling it as ‘something that just happens’ (in my case, “I’m just a lost cause as a person, and that everyone else somehow has a secret sauce that I lack”). This applies to every system imaginable, from government to relationships to simple everyday actions.,It’s way too easy to pressure ourselves into situations with no room for error, and then beat ourselves up when it happens. True, our stupid user judgement may be the final tipping point to a lot of domino-effect mistakes. However, fundamentally we are simply not set up for success, and neither do we set ourselves up for success. The fact that UX as a field exists is a testament to that truth.,This is clearly a crock of bullshit. After running enough user tests, I learned to drop all my expectations in human success. With little exception, people fail to listen to instructions, have all sorts of differing expectations, and easily get frustrated. After seeing my users fail in increasingly creative ways, I resigned myself to stop idolizing people.,An unfair logic that my depression exploits is “if this person doesn’t mention making a mistake, that must mean that they don’t ever make mistakes”. So when it comes to reporting important errors, if nobody talks about it, it must not exist. There is a real stigma (both internal and external) associated with admitting to mistakes, and if you call attention to an error you might be blamed for it and suffer the consequences. Most systems in place protect the status quo and penalize those who criticize them. This is very human and understandable, but ultimately harmful.,For me, that means constantly exploring my own limits and accepting that I am and always will be a naturally failure-prone human being. I won’t be able to progress if I can’t accept myself at my starting point.,After identifying something in need of improvement, unfortunately we still have to actually put the effort into improving it. No matter the context, motivation is intensely personal and illogical. Alas, I still haven’t found a surefire way to bamboozle my brain into tapping into this and I may never find one. At least I now know that I’m not alone in the struggle bus.,“[How can we overcome the] power of social pressures on behavior [which causes] otherwise sensible people to do things they know are wrong and possibly dangerous[?]… Good design alone is not sufficient. We need different training… to adequately address social, economic, and cultural pressures [which is] the hardest parts of ensuring safe… behavior.”