Why is failure good for creativity?

Charles Kettering

You learn from your failures, said Charles Kettering, the engineer who invented the automobile self-starter and who, at his death, had developed more major inventions than any other American except Thomas Edison. He used to point out : "From the time a kid starts kindergarten to the time he graduates from college, he will be examined three or four times a year, and if he flunks once, he's out. Now an inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. An inventor treats his failures like practice shots."

The founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, gave the same kind of advice, "The way to succeed is to double your failure rate." Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling said that the trick in coming up with good ideas is to think up a great many ideas and just get rid of the bad ones.