How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Recorded Paula Scher said elsewhere, not written here
When you’re working and you make mistakes, particularly when you’re young, you make discoveries because you do things that are inappropriate and wrongheaded, but within the wrongheadedness you find an unexpected way to go. These things are truly the breakthroughs.

Debbie Millman, Psychology Today, 'Brainstorm' column, 1 May 2009 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 73 →
Derek Sivers Founder of CD Baby; author of Anything You Want
In the end, I had to pay $3.3 million dollars to buy back that 90%.
Recorded Essay on sive.rs, Derek Sivers, 27 May 2009 source ↗
Mohamed ElBaradei Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1997-2009; Nobel Peace Prize 2005
Unfortunately, in the case of Iraq, I believe we could have done that through an inspection process. I was calling for a few months more to complete our work. We hadn’t seen indications of weapons of mass destruction. We hadn’t seen indications of nuclear weapons. ... Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way. There was faulty intelligence. There were lots of other considerations that made a decision to go to war tempting, to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview, 2006 source ↗
Drew Houston Co-founder and chief executive of Dropbox
No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable.
Recorded MIT 147th Commencement, MIT News (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 7 June 2013 source ↗
John Updike Novelist, poet and critic; twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
I was prepared to fail. I was prepared to not be able to get things accepted, because I saw that happen to my mother.
Recorded Academy of Achievement, Academy of Achievement interview, Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, 1 June 1999 source ↗

More on failure & regret

Also answered this

Susan Butcher, Drew Houston, François Ozon, Jensen Huang, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Leon Panetta

Search the directory for somebody in particular.

Explore further

Report this answer