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22 Fail Small to Succeed Big
One of my favorite stories is the famous account of how 3M came to develop Post-it notes.
Initially, the expenditure of significant human and financial resources to develop a new type of glue resulted in failure. The project managed only to create a rather unsticky inferior form of glue. At this point it would have been easy to declare the effort a complete failure and discontinue the project.
One 3M employee, however, continued to work with the glue and discovered a simple but powerful way to use this failure. When he applied the glue to small strips of paper, he stumbled on a breakthrough. He created useful bookmarks that could be used in his hymnal as he sang in the church choir. ...
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