Every failure is a lesson

Today I gave a talk, and something went wrong. Not terribly wrong, but wrong enough that it was clear to my audience that something went wrong. In this case I was using an unfamiliar projector, and I was foiled by some over-eager projector software that moved things around on my screen.

And from there reality forks into two directions. In one direction, there is the real time question of how to deal with what is happening in the moment. What do you say next? How do you keep your talk going, and integrate the error into your presentation without losing momentum?

In the other direction, what have you learned, and how do you apply that knowledge? Of course you start finding a way to make your software more bulletproof. But can you also develop new ways of recovering, in the moment, from the next inevitable presentation mishap?

The good news is that every failure is a lesson. As the saying goes, we never learn from our successes.