> Trying things that fail, working hard towards a problem, banging your head against something impossible, these are all worthwhile endeavors.

I believe that this is the most important thing... and something that people are afraid of. I've got dozens of personal projects and more than a few branches in my employers repo of things that didn't work... things that I tried, figured out it wasn't going anywhere and went to try some other approach.

I suspect that there's a bit of sunk cost fallacy going on elsewhere. "If I don't know how to do it, I'm not even going to try" and "I got this far, I'll keep doing it despite it being wrong."

As a programmer, I am often disappointed at the lack of curiosity in the language and how things could be done. My example would be people writing Java code as if it was still Java 7 - no streams, no Optionals... The fear of having to go back and do it again if using something new doesn't work they'll be in a worse position than if they did it the old way and not realizing that learning what doesn't work or seeing how things that didn't work in this situation may be the right thing for some other future problem.