The Garage Experience

We try to instill in Academy students a willingness to fail, to try ideas that might not work, to experiment in ways that let the world tell us what is not a good idea. We think it is important for people who have always been successful students to make a transition from always being able to figure out what the teacher wanted to being a producer of solutions to real world problems for which the answer is not in the back of the book. The only way to do this is to make mistakes and develop the habit of listening to and learning from what the world has to tell you about your mistakes.

The assessment of a student's capacity to use failure as an asset is necessarily subjective. We look for a willingness to take risks - not necessarily risks as in daring-do, but the risk of exploring unconventional solutions, testing earlier rather than later and more often rather than less. We look for the attitude with which one grapples with a failure: does one derive insight and motivation for what's next or does one back off and get depressed? One shows one's capacity to use failure as an asset when each failure yields crucial information, when one fails sooner to succeed eventually.