“Would you like me to give you a formula for… success? It’s quite simply, really. Double your rate of failure… You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all… You can be discouraged by failure — or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that’s where you’ll find success. On the far side of failure.”
-Thomas J. Watson
Founder of IBM
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
-Bill Gates
Founder of Microsoft
-Dr Martin Russell
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This is a definition issue. Seems like people are obsessed with being right, and this plays out as “If your idea doesn’t work as you hypothesized it might, then not only did the experiment fail but YOU PERSONALLY FAILED” Since an experiment cannot fail, but can only give unexpected results, there is no way anybody should be taking things personally in relation to it. We really do learn more from unexpected results than we do from getting the expected results. A research scientist who avoided or hid unexpected results would never keep a job in a lab.
Definition issue is spot on.
Penicillin was an unexpected finding. So was Viagra
Many times it is just a mindset shift. We can look at failures as a bad thing or as a growth opportunity. There is always a lesson in our failures, we just have to be aware of that and find the lesson.
Edison failed thousand times before he invented the light bulb. I think it’s a good lesson we can all learn.
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