A Learning Experience

I struggled for some time getting the vacuum assisted lost wax casting system to perform properly. I thought it was mostly my fault and I almost believed the technique was beyond my ability. I was considering jumping over to the centripetal casting system. I decided I needed to keep trying as I knew the equipment I had was working perfectly and the only weakness was myself. It has turned out that the vacuum process is not beyond my skill and ability, but was something I just needed to practice to develop the proper skill.

Now my vacuum assisted casting is going very smoothly and I am not in the least intimidated by the process. There is a lesson to be learned here which is to pay close attention to what is going wrong. My lesson was to have faith in myself and work past the early failures.

I didn’t just find out about this little secret of success called “keep trying”. I have practiced it all my life. It is the very reason I am now confident with vacuum assist. Quitters are never successful people as they find failure as something to fear and don’t want to risk appearing weak or unable to perform, even to themselves. The usual “out” is to blame the equipment.

It’s not the equipment.

I have discovered I can learn from my mistakes when I accept the responsibility. If you have been reading my blogs for any length of time you have seen when I admit getting something wrong. I usually call it “a learning experience” and will describe what went wrong. I believe learning experiences should be shared so that someone else doesn’t have to make the same error to receive the lesson.

In my major occupation where I ran multimillion dollar projects, we often discussed “lessons learned”. The problem I feel still exists is they (the lessons learned) were never published in a searchable archive, where someone in the future doing the same kind of project could research and also learn from previous mistakes. We become doomed to making the same errors again.

So I am willing to share my experience here. I hope it does help someone else and I also hope I don’t have TOO MANY to share.