Quotes About Failure

Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail.

Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)—yet he gets little or no credit for it.

In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur is still alive, though perhaps morally broken and socially stigmatized

We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We

summarize the research in complex systems: Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail. These three authors present the world of social science as full of power laws, a view with which I most certainly agree.

since mistakes lower the odds of future mistakes.

The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile, and that's what makes, among other things, entrepreneurship work: the fragility of individual entrepreneurs and their necessarily high failure rate.

that to understand successes and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures.

Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success—but it is also necessary for failure.

They will find something he did before when he was successful that he has subsequently stopped doing, and attribute his failure to that. The truth will be, however, that he simply ran out of luck.

Note that in traditional societies even those who fail—but have taken risks—have a higher status than those who are not exposed.

Have you ever wondered why so many of these straight-A students end up going nowhere in life while someone who lagged behind is now getting the shekels, buying the diamonds

cualquier cosa atrapada en la planificación tiende a fracasar, precisamente, a causa de estos atributos: es un mito que la planificación ayude a las grandes empresas porque, como hemos visto, el mundo es demasiado aleatorio e imprevisible para basar una política en la visibilidad del futuro. Lo que sobrevive surge de la interacción entre la adaptabilidad y algunas condiciones del entorno.

Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

Just as a little bit of fire here and there gets rid of the flammable material in a forest, a little bit of harm here and there in an economy weeds out the vulnerable firms early enough to allow them to "fail early" (so they can start again) and minimize the long-term damage to the system.

Most mistakes get worse when you try to correct them.

His losses were mounting

People go to business school to learn how to do well while ensuring their survival—but what the economy, as a collective, wants them to do is to not survive, rather to take a lot, a lot of imprudent risks themselves and be blinded by the odds. Their respective industries improve from failure to failure

at any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders.

People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody's fall can drag others down—for continuous failures work to preserve the system. Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.

make a distinction between positive contingencies, and negative. Learn to distinguish between those human undertakings in which a lack of predictability has been extremely beneficial, and those where failure to understand the future has caused harm.

When constrained systems, those hungry for natural disorder, collapse, as they are eventually bound to, since they are fragile, failure is never seen as the result of fragility. Rather, such failure is interpreted as the product of poor forecasting.

It's much easier to sell "Look what I did for you" than "Look what I avoided for you.