Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Fine Art of Failure

The Economist.com is an unlikely place perhaps to glean inspiration. This guy named Schumpeter wrote an article  called Fail Often, Fail Well.


He quotes A.G Lafley, a successful ex-boss from Procter and Gable as saying that "we learn much more from failure than we do from success."

And its true. Failure can teach things that success takes much longer to instill. My best friend's dad always taught him that bought experience was the best kind, meaning if it hits you in the wallet (time or money) you'd remember that lesson forever.

The main thing with a successful failure is stepping back and analyzing what happened.

"Thomas Edison performed 9,000 experiments before coming up with a successful version of the light bulb," Schumpeter wrote. I didn't know that. Imagine how discouraged he could have become. Probably T. Edison wouldn't have blogged on all those failures either. Somethings just have to be done in private.

All the new ideas we see for gear, tents, equipment and extreme sports are exciting. We can expect to see failures due to all this creativity, and if this guy is right,  it will be followed by great success.







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