As an infant, you learned how to walk by trial and error. The first time you
made the effort you fell down and returned to crawling. You ignored your fears
about falling and the results you had produced. You stood up again and again and
fell again and again. Eventually you stood with a wobble and then another fall.
Finally, you walked upright. Suppose as infants we had learned to fear failure. Many of us would still be crawling
around on all fours.
It is the same with everything in life. Our nature is
to act and produce results without fear. Yet, because, we have been educated to
think critically and judgmentally, we imagine strong reasons for inaction and
then allow it to become our reality, even before we make an attempt. Our fear is
supported by an illusion that it is possible to fail, and that failure means we
are worthless.
The reality is that there is no such thing as failure. Whenever we attempt to
do something and fail, we end up doing something else. You cannot fail, you can
only produce results. Rather than judging some result as a failure, ask "What
have I learned about what doesn't work?", "Can this explain something that I
didn't set out to explain?","What can I do with these results?", and "What have
I discovered that I didn't set out to discover?".
Take the first airplane. On Dec. 8, 1903, Samuel Pierpont Langley, a leading
government- funded scientist, launched with much fanfare his flying machine on
the Potomac. It plummeted into the river. Nine days later, Orville and Wilbur
Wright got the first plane off the ground. Why did these bicycle mechanics
succeed when a famous scientist failed? It was because Langley hired experts to
execute his theoretical concepts without going a series of trial and
errors.
Studying the Wrights' diaries, you see that insight and execution are
inextricably woven together. Over years, as they solved problems like wing shape
and wing warping, they made several mistakes which inspired several adjustments
all of which involved a small spark of insight that led to other insights. Their
numerous mistakes led to unexpected alternative ways which, in turn, led to the
numerous discoveries that made flight possible.
Learn
to Fail
It is a paradox of life that you have to learn to fail in order to succeed.
Henry Ford's first two automobile companies failed. What he learned from his
failures led him to be the first to apply assembly line manufacturing to the
production of affordable automobiles in the world. He became one of the three
most famous and richest men in the world during his time.
When Thomas Edison was seeking to invent the electric light bulb, he had
thousands of failures. He would record the results, make adjustments and try
again. It took him approximately 10,000 experiments to invent the perfect set-up
for the electric light bulb. Once an assistant asked him why he persisted after
so many failures. Edison responded by saying he had not failed once. He had
learned 10,000 things that didn't work. There was no such thing as a failure in
Edison's mind.
When you try something and produce a result that is not what you intended but
that you find interesting , drop everything else and study it. B. F. Skinner
emphasized this as a first principle of scientific methodology. This is what
William Shockley and a multi-discipline Bell labs team did. They were formed to invent the MOS
transistor and ended up instead with the junction transistor and the new science
of semiconductor physics. These developments eventually led to the MOS
transistor and then to the integrated circuit and to new breakthroughs in
electronics and computers. William Shockley described it as a process of
"creative failure methodology."
Answering the questions about discoveries from failures in a novel,
unexpected way is the essential creative act. It is not luck but creative
insight of the highest order. A DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett set out to invent a
new refrigerant. Instead, he created a glob of white waxy material that
conducted heat and did not stick to surfaces. Fascinated by this "unexpected"
material, he abandoned his original line of research and experimented with this
interesting material, which eventually became known by its household name,
"Teflon."
The discovery of the electromagnetic laws was also a "failed" experiment. The
relationship between electricity and magnetism was first observed in 1820 by Oersted in
a public lecture at which he was demonstrating the "well known fact" that
electricity and magnetism were completely independent phenomena. This time the
experiment failed! - an electric current produced a magnetic effect. Oersted was
observant enough to notice this effect, honest enough to admit it, and diligent
enough to follow up and publish. Maxwell used these experiments to extend Isaac
Newton's methods of modeling and mathematical analysis in the mechanical and
visible world to the invisible world of electricity and magnetism and derived
Maxwell's Laws which opened the doors to our modern age of electricity and
electronics.
If
you just look at a zero you see nothing; but if you pick it up and look through
it you will see the world. It is the same with failure. If you look at something
as failure, you learn nothing; but look at it as your teacher and you will learn
the value of knowing what doesn't work, learning something new, and the joy of
discovering the unexpected.
