What I Learned From Making Breakfast

My wife likes eggs over easy. When we first got married, all I knew how to do was make scrambled eggs. But I like breakfast and like doing things for my wife so I determined to learn how to make eggs over easy the way she liked.

In case you don’t know what I mean by eggs over easy, it is an egg where the yolk is not cooked but pretty much all the white of the egg is and the yolk is sort of enclosed in a pocket. If you only cook it on one side it is called sunny side up.

The hardest part about cooking eggs over easy is making sure you don’t break the yolk when you flip it over.

Cooking Eggs Is Harder Than It Looks

Many of my first attempts at making eggs over easy were complete failures. I broke yokes left and right. Sometimes the yokes broke as I cracked the egg into the skillet. Other times they broke as I was putting the eggs onto the plate to serve. Not only did I break yokes, but often I undercooked one of the sides because you can’t see it. Eventually I started getting better though.

When I first started, maybe 1 in 3 or 4 eggs would turn out right. But soon I noticed that I was only breaking 1 out of every 2 yokes, then 2 out of 3 and at least 1 of them was cooked thoroughly, now I can get about 9 out of 10 cooked all the way without breaking the yokes. This took a lot of broken eggs though.

Failure Is the Way to Success

Cooking eggs is just an example. Most things in life worth learning how to do will require you to fail multiple times before you become good at them.

Making games is no exception. The common wisdom that I have heard in several places is you will probably make at least 10 bad games before you make a good one. That does not mean you intentionally make bad games. What it means is you make those games as best you can but don’t worry about them being good or popular. They probably won’t be.

Fear of Failure

This is what stops most people. They are afraid to fail so they don’t even try. If you won’t try then you can’t ever succeed.

I struggle with this myself. Many times I write these posts to myself because I need the reminder to just do the thing and not worry about success. Success for you when you are learning is to get something done, not to have it be perfect.

So get out there, break some eggs, and fail just as hard as you can so you can succeed.

I Want to Be a Better Developer