failure
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
“Worstward Ho,” in Nohow on: Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1980), 89.
The nature of process, to one degree or another, involves failure. You have at it. It doesn’t work. You keep pushing. It gets better. But it’s not good. It gets worse. You go at it again. Then you desperately stab at it, believing “this isn’t going to work.” And it does!
Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design by Jennifer Bass & Pat Kirkham (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011), 386.
While I’m proud of what we’ve achieved together, I’m far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, “I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.”
DNC’s speech, Charlotte, North Carolina, September 6, 2012.
The need for success and the fear of failure are two aspects of the same inner attitude. For it isn’t failure that causes the sinking sensation we all know, but the fear of failure. Failure isn’t the enemy—fear is. One learns, after all, by failing. This is elementary; we all know it, except when it applies to ourselves…
The Work of Craft (London: Arcana, 1986), 16.
Failure is a big source of innovation in music.
Soundcheck, NPR, “Musical Chain Letter: Brian Eno,” November 11, 2011.
It would be a complete error to suppose that the great discoverer is one who seizes at once unerringly upon the truth, or has any special method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind far exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must almost of necessity be many times as numerous as those which prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record may remain of more than the hundredth part.
The Principles of Science (London: Macmillan, 1874), 221–22.
The history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it: a much longer history of being spectacularly wrong, again and again. And not just wrong, but messy. A shockingly large number of transformative ideas in the annals of science can be attributed to contaminated laboratory environments. Alexander Fleming famously discovered the medical virtues of penicillin when the mold accidentally infiltrated a culture of Staphylococcus.
Where Good Ideas Come From (New York: Riverhead, 2010), 134.
Do not be too timid & squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. What if they are a little coarse, & you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, & get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never more be so afraid of a tumble.
Nov. 1842 entry, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 294–95.
The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence—the “smart” compliment—is that is misrepresents the neural reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activity, which is learning from mistakes. Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process.
How We Decide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 53–54.
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, vol 1 (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871), 404.
When it comes to politics—no, I don’t cry. I would never think of crying about any loss of an office, because that’s always a possibility, and if you’re professional, then you deal with it professionally.
“Questions for Nancy Pelosi: Minority Report,” by Deborah Solomon, The New York Times, November 18, 2010.
There could be nutrients
in failure—
deep amendments
to the shallow soil
of wishes.
Think of the
dark and bitter
flavors of
black ales
and peasant loaves.
Think of licorices.
Think about
the tales of how
Indians put fishes
under corn plants.
Next time hope
relinquishes a form,
think about that.”
“Failure 2,” The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 2010), 202.