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How has a setback or failure set you up for later success?
DM
David MacMillan

Scottish organic chemist

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
I don’t know. That’s a terrible answer I realise, and everyone wants a nice straight forward answer. I think everyone, all scientists, have these kind of wacky ideas along the way, and some of them work and some of them don’t work. And this was one that, you know, came and was successful and went forward, and again it sounds obvious to say we were lucky – but we were lucky, you know, there’s way more ideas fail than ever succeed, and this was one that, you know, we were very excited about at the beginning, we thought it had a very low probability of success, but it took off, and it took off like gangbusters. That was wonderful to see.

Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded shortly after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 October 2022 source ↗

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Daniel Kahneman Psychologist; laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, 2002
I got quite nice results in my one-question studies, but never wrote up any of the work, because I had set myself impossible standards: in order not to pollute the literature, I wanted to report only findings that I had replicated in detail at least once, and the replications were never quite perfect. I realized only gradually that my aspirations demanded more statistical power and therefore much larger samples than I was intuitively inclined to run. This observation also came in handy some time later.
Recorded Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 2002 source ↗
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Structural biologist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 2009
Well, I'll be honest with you. I was a theoretical physicist but my Ph.D. work was on a problem that was not particularly interesting to me at the time. And I used to subscribe to Scientific American and I found that there were all these wonderful discoveries happening in biology and I also knew that a number of physicists had gone into biology and been successful. So, I decided to switch.
Recorded Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded minutes after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 7 October 2009 source ↗
Richard Feynman Theoretical physicist; Nobel laureate in Physics, 1965
It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish.  I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.
Recorded Excerpt from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”, Engineering and Science / Caltech Magazine, 1985 source ↗
Larry Ellison American businessman
Oh, absolutely. I think most overachievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure. Unless failure gets very close and very nearby that fear doesn’t reach profound levels, but it drives us. It drives me to work very hard.
Recorded Academy of Achievement, Academy of Achievement interview, San Francisco, California, 1 May 1997 source ↗

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