Never Fear to Fail

In 1899 Elbert Hubbard wrote the essay "A Message to Garcia", a true story of initiative and responsibility with Colonel Andrew Rowan as the hero, the only man who could get through difficult terrain, during war time, to find and deliver a important message to General Garcia.  Throughout history we identify the hero by the way he/she will shoulder the responsibility and continue one when things get hard.  My instructor shared a quote that really stood out, and gave me some new perspective.  "Accept mistakes as the price you pay to learn."  As a people, we fear to fail.  We often see failure as a sign that we can not do something.  Instead we need to see failure as a chance to start over and try something new.  In his work to invent the light bulb, Thomas Edison often said that he had not failed, he just found 10,000 ways it won't work.  Do we look at our failures in that light?

Last week I lamented about the stress, the late nights, the exhaustion of the week, and some of the mistakes that were made.  This week was a slower week, but I intentionally planned everything.  I took the time Thursday to scale all of the ingredients, making the Friday production go so much smoother. Even as late orders came in, I was able to plan around them, and they became opportunities instead of obstacles.  

One of my many unpleasant experiences from last week was that all of my bagels failed, and had to be remade.  While that was very unpleasant and caused way more stress, I was able to look at possible reasons they failed and make some adjustments.  I do a retarded proof over night for the bagels, meaning that I slow down or stop the active rise by refrigerating the dough.  To do this, I form all the bagels and have them on sheet pans stacking inside the fridge to be baked in the morning.  Doing this, they do not rise at all, but they do develop the deeper flavor of a longer ferment.  Last week 3 of my four sheet pans of bagel overrose in the fridge and then collapsed when they were baked, leaving very unhappy looking bagels.  This was a massive failure, and caused a lot of extra stress in remaking the bagels.  This week I was able to troubleshoot the problem, and made some changes.  

    Part of the problem I identifies was that I had over crowded the top part of the fridge to make room for 4 sheet pans in the bottom.  This caused poor air circulation and did not effectively chill the bagel dough.   This week I made sure there was good air circulation.  I also had the bin of dough sit in my unheated entry way for the bulk ferment (the first rise before forming the bagels) so as to keep the dough at a lower temperature from the beginning.  This led to a much happier bagel and turned last weeks failure into this weeks success.  

This mind set of looking at failure as just another opportunity to try again will lead us to continue to grow as a person and as a business.  Mistakes happen, and occasionally something will go wrong.  A mistake only becomes a failure when we refuse to learn from it.