Pasternak on failure

Speaking of ‘failure’, as I was, I particularly like what Boris Pasternak has Zhivago say on the subject to Lara:

I don’t think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn’t of much value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.

What a great novel is Doctor Zhivago, one of the very best of the twentieth century, I feel ‒ somewhat underrated now. Time to read it again...

The value of failure

Recent highlighting of the value of failure includes a book by Mario Livio, Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe, and coincidentally the opening in Edinburgh of the world’s first Library of Mistakes.

In engineering, it’s usually possible to try things out, learn from failure and adapt quite quickly. In developing a successful light bulb, Thomas Edison did hundreds, even thousands, of iterations in developing a filament that would both provide good illumination and last a decent length of time, with a multitude of failures along the path.

Science is rather different, as major new theories sometimes have to wait for years before they can be either validated or discarded.

The new library in Edinburgh records a litany of financial disasters. I wonder if anyone at RBS (or any of the other banks that ran themselves into the rocks) will be paying it a visit?

 

Socrates on success and failure

Not that I’m a great expert on the man, but I like the summary of Socrates on the subject of success and failure in Peter Stothard’s recent book On the Spartacus Road:

“Failure was so often better than success; there was so much more to be learnt from it.”

But only, of course, if one is looking. My experience of corporate behaviour is that people generally first look, then look away, then walk away.

Edison’s “failures”

Amidst all those amazing inventions that everyone knows about – electric lighting and recorded sound perhaps the most widely recognised – Thomas Edison had his fair share of "failures".

At least that’s how I thought about them initially. It’s clear to me now that most of them were either technical problems that he and his teams could not solve, or ideas too far ahead of their time.

For example, early in the twentieth century he worked on a storage battery that would drive automobiles. He and his teams had already been working on battery design for several decades at this stage. After several years, it turned out that the internal combustion engine was more effective - and petroleum was readily available at that time in what appeared to be an inexhaustible supply.

Wind forward a hundred years and the competition to produce acceptable electrically-powered automobiles is now a major obsession of the motor industry, with billions being invested in development by General Motors and other leading companies. A recent report has signaled that by 2020 electric and other "green" cars will make up a third of global car sales.

Edison must be smiling somewhere.

My own experience is that nearly all “innovations” have been "failures" before they were successful, the gap filled by creative problem-solving.

Is that your experience?

Do not fear mistakes

“Do not fear mistakes,” said the great American jazz trumpeter, Miles Davis. “There are none.”

(I usually have “Kind of Blue” in my car. Desert island music.)

It reminds me of what the inventor, Buckminster Fuller (he of the geodesic dome), wrote on a related theme: “There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.”

So many successes emerge (sooner or later) from so-called mistakes and failures.