The Power of Failure by Fran Tarkenton

Author:Fran Tarkenton [Tarkenton, Fran]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781621574361
Publisher: Regnery Publishing

ENCOURAGE INTELLIGENT FAILURE

We talk about “trial and error” but it’s really “trial and failure.” As we learned in chapter 1, Edison tested some ten thousand materials before he identified a practical filament for his lamp. It was a time-consuming and exhausting process, and when a reporter asked him if he was discouraged at having failed ten thousand times, the inventor replied, “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”

Edison proudly boasted that he never permitted himself “to become discouraged under any circumstances.” After performing “thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem,” one of Edison’s technicians complained about having failed “to find out anything.” Edison responded “that we had learned something . . . [the] certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way.”

The inventor was not being flip. He believed that any experiment that yielded data was successful, whether or not the result was also immediately profitable. We “sometimes learn a lot from our failures,” he said, provided that “we have put into the effort the best thought and work we are capable of.” Both lazy and hardworking people fail. The difference is that if you work hard enough to achieve your failure, you are likely to get something valuable out of it.

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