Whenever you’re making a movie, especially when you’re writing, you always have self-doubts. I did the first location shooting in Tunisia.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Question
What is the best advice you have ever received?
Time & hindsight
No. I mean if you fail 70 percent of the time, you had a great year. You're dealing with failure seven out of ten times as a hitter.
Academy of Achievement interviewer, Academy of Achievement interview, Washington, D.C., 18 August 2020 source ↗
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George Lucas
Filmmaker; creator of Star Wars and founder of Lucasfilm
Recorded
Academy of Achievement, Academy of Achievement interview, Skywalker Ranch, California, 1 June 1999
source ↗
August Wilson
Playwright; two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama
I was writing poetry. But I found the theater such an exciting experience that one day I went home to try. I had one character say to the other guy, “Hey, man, what’s happening.” And the other guy said, “Nothing.” I sat there for twenty minutes and neither of my guys would talk. So 1 said to myself, “Well, that’s all right. After all, I’m a poet. I don’t have to be a playwright. To hell with writing plays. Let other people write plays.” I didn’t try to write a play for a number of years after that first experience.
Recorded
Bonnie Lyons and George Plimpton, Interview conducted over lunch at the Sheraton Hotel’s Fourteenth Street Bar, Atlanta, The Paris Review, Issue 153, Winter 1999, 1999
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.
Henry R. Kravis
Financier; co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
We have made many investments in our history. Not all have succeeded. As entrepreneurs willing to take some risk, we have made many mistakes. But when we are successful, we leave the company better than we found it.
More from Cal Ripken Jr.
View profile →You know what? Eddie was probably the best leader by example and not so much by words. You know, sometimes if he said something, you know, then you had to stand up and listen to it, but for the most part, he taught me the importance of being there every single day.
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