How to Fail Successfully

What is the difference between failure that leads to innovation and failure that leads to… more failure?

What does it mean when people say, “That was a successful failure”?

The answer, researchers believe, lies not in the failure itself but how we recall it or, more precisely, how we store it. Successful failures are those people who remember exactly where and how they failed. This way, when they encounter the same problem again, they’re able to retrieve these “failure indices” quickly and efficiently. They don’t make the same mistake twice.

It seems that the advice we were given as children when confronted with failure, “Just forget it and move on” is wrong. “Remember it and move on” is the way to success.

The guiding principle for “successful failure” is the scientific method. Fail until something works. It’s about failing in a thoughtful and efficient manner. Failure can be a wonderful learning experience as long as it’s in the aid of some continuing process. The important thing is to fail early. Kill the ones that aren’t working right away.

fertilizer failure

Think of failure like fertilizer. It must be used by a skilled farmer, otherwise it is useless and smells bad.

Feed Yourself Well

Old-Faithful-geyser

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines and music, you will automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry period in my life because I feed myself well.” – Ray Bradbury

A Description of Creativity

When Einstein was asked how he made his great discoveries, he said, “by using the imagination.” Creativity, then, could be described as using the imagination to move forward. This is something that we all do, all the time. In other words, we are all creative.

There are two generally accepted forms of creativity:

1. Creating something from nothing

2. Giving a new character to something

Of the two, I personally prefer the second. ‘Giving birth’ to something is often too violent. I prefer to think of it as ‘giving life’ because the process is incremental. Creativity is most often slow work, even though an idea does sneak up on us every now and then. But in general, everything is based on something else. Very little is completely new. From the moment we are born, we are bombarded with experiences which ultimately inform our creativity.