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Failure Is the Mother of Invention
- fennecfoxen 4y agoFrom the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOyIJVUaoeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOyIJVUaoeg
- csdvrx 4y agopaywalled
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoAnd yet at most companies, you are not allowed to even contemplate such a crazy idea. Need for absolute certainty and stability generate conservative committees ( and committee members ), who loathe but to say anything definitive. Granted, I mostly saw it in banking, but I assume it is not that uncommon.
- gadflyinyoureye 4y agoNecessity is still the mother. Failure is the Mengele of invention.
- SMAAART 4y agoI think this is an OpEd for the book "Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making" by Tony Fadell
- atoav 4y agoI am an improvisational musician. The key to invent from failure is to develope a ever present sense of observing oneself from the outside. The instead of being emberassed when something goes wrong, one can "feel" the potentials that might lurk in where it went wrong. John Cage once said: If you make a mistake, repeat it. A trumpeter getting stuck once in a melody is clearly a mistake, them doing the same thing again, and then spinning the thing into a different direction is not only perceived as interesting, it is probably one of the moments where their true genius will become visible the most. Key to this is to not be too attached to the plan, but to the goal. The plan is that melody you had in mind, or on the sheet. The goal is to play interesting music. If the plan is in the way of playing interesting music, ditch it. If the an is no longer feasible because you fucked up, the plan needs to be adjusted. This sounds logical for music, but in all other domains (except maybe art and design) people have a very hard time ditching or adjusting the plans immidiately at the point of failure. Kill your darlings and you will get new ones.
- puranjay 4y agoImprov of any kind, in general, is fantastic for learning how to fail publicly. I do a bit of improv comedy and its fantastic for getting you out to make a fool of yourself publicly. Some of the best work in improv comes from people failing and flailing and channeling that into something fantastic.
- black_knight 4y ago«Once is a mistake. Twice is Jazz.»
- amfortas7 4y agoOne of the greatest piece of music of all time is the fruit of a blatant mistake: Keith Jarrett's Köln concert. Instead of the required Bösendorfer 290 Imperial, the organization team brought a smaller and badly tuned piano on stage. Jarrett - who was a bit of a diva at times - initially refused to play, but gave in, and the recording is the thing of legends.
- klysm 4y agoKeith Jarrett’s harmonic improvisational ability is insane. You could get lost analyzing small parts of his concerts for a long time.
- m463 4y ago(probably unrelated) I love the "failures" of Victor Borge (check out youtube videos)
- julienreszka 4y agoits not, necessity is
- JetAlone 4y agoInvention has been raised in a convent of adoptive mothers.
- dredmorbius 4y agoPaywall: https://archive.ph/g0EXi https://archive.ph/g0EXi
- paulpauper 4y agothis notion that you need to fail seems wrong. Facebook, Microsoft, google never came close to failing and never had big failures yet still had innovations.
- jjulius 4y ago>Facebook https://www.vox.com/2014/2/25/11623922/meet-facebooks-graveyard-of-dead-products https://www.vox.com/2014/2/25/11623922/meet-facebooks-gravey... >Microsoft Zune >Google https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- sgarman 4y agoThis post makes me realize you really need to define success before you do anything else.
- cableshaft 4y ago> Facebook, Microsoft, google ... never had big failures Google: Wave, Orkut, Google+, Google Video, Google Glass [1] Microsoft: Band, Bob, Kin, Zune, Lumia, Windows 8 [2] Facebook: Poke, Parse, Beacon, Credits, Paper, Slingshot, Libra [3] That's just products. If you go into security breaches, lawsuits, and operating procedures, you could list several more. These companies are large enough to have big failures and still keep kicking, and have people start to forget the failures over time (I had forgotten several of these myself). But they definitely aren't immune to having big failures. [1]: https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2018/2/26/googles-product-failures https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2018/2/26/googles-product-fai... [2]: https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-failures-windows-vista-cortana-zune-internet-1849071697/slides/10 https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-failures-windows-vista-cortana... [3]: https://startuptalky.com/facebook-failed-products/ https://startuptalky.com/facebook-failed-products/
- danielmarkbruce 4y agoI think his point was their very first product was a success. No failures required.
- gnicholas 4y agoAlso recommended: Creative Selection, by Apple engineer Ken Kocienda: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Process/dp/1250194466 https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Proc...
- zhenyakovalyov 4y agoi can’t recommend this one more
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dqpb 4y agoExploration is the Mother of Invention. Exploration increases failure. The opposite of Exploration is Exploitation. Exploitation minimizes known failure, at the cost of also minimizing invention.