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Reward failure
“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The popular image of the inventor is that of the mad scientist locked up in a tower, dreaming up the perfect product that they will unleash upon the world. In truth, it’s a much more fragmented process. And at its heart lies failure.
‘If you want to discover something that other people haven’t,’ says British inventor James Dyson, ‘you need to do things the wrong way.’ In designing his bagless vacuum cleaner, Dyson made 5,126 prototypes before he got it right. Understandably, this has made Dyson an advocate for the power of failure, saying: ‘I’ve always thought schoolchildren should be rewarded for the number of failures ...
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