When I'm trying out a new technology, I often fail. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I continue to fail.
So, in the first few moments after I try a new technology and experience failure, I cannot tell if I am on the path to success and have just experienced a momentary failure or if I am going to fail.
I am wondering if anyone has a way to tell the difference between these two scenarios.
Only a few failures are permanent, just keep trying and continue learning.
I generally have some kind of time limit. Not necessarily a hard and fast limit, but just a "I feel frustrated" limit. So I'll keep failing and plugging away until I really feel like I'm getting nowhere anymore.
A good example of this is my recent transition to Mercurial - I came across this site which I took the time to read, then I spent the next couple days exploring all the ins and outs, reading documentation and playing with it. Eventually I felt like I understood it, and haven't looked back. But even though Mercurial's pretty easy to use, it still took a little bit of time to understand, and I just kept pushing on since I hadn't reached that threshold.
By my metric, the fact that you're asking this question probably implies you're past that "I feel frustrated" point, and it might be good to drop it, and maybe come back to it another day.
If you are convinced what you are doing should work, and you are determined to solve it, then it's probably a momentary failure.
If you are grafting random examples together without taking the time to understand what you're doing, it's probably permanent!