Failure to Prepare is Preparing to Fail — Making Mistakes
You would think that having spent the entire week thinking and reading through how to build a windmill, it would have been easy. Let me tell you that failure to prepare is preparing to fail! I got all my materials and started filming my Plan A project page. Everything was going right until I had to glue things. Gluing things and trying to film don’t exactly mix very well because you have to wait for the glue to dry up. Nonetheless, I pressed and glued as many things as I could and waited a few hours to dry.
After everything dried, I realized that I was missing a pretty important piece to put two pieces together. I tried gluing them but couldn’t get the pieces to stay in a position that would allow them to dry. Then I tried to tape them together. . . that didn’t work either as the tape was to big not flexible enough to help me keep the pieces together. Then I tried to rig something up to help hold the pieces together while the glue dried up. That didn’t work either as I was just trying to get things to work but nothing was working. As I’m doing all of this, I’m recording and I’m just getting frustrated because clearly I have no idea what I’m doing. I decided to keep recording and now I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to edit the video to show that my frustration is actually a critical part of the engineering process.
Just as I was about to give up, I remember I have a hot glue gun. Instant success. I was able to hot glue the pieces together, then I I hot glued everything else I had glued together to make sure everything held together. I learned an interesting thing today. I normally don’t give up right away. I tried option after option, continuously evolving my thought process to get these two pieces to stick together. While I’m still not sure how I’m going to present this on film, I wanted to capture that this problem I ran into is the very thing I’m trying to capture and help people understand. Figuring things out when things get challenging is one of the main things I want to share with the world!
