"The answer lies in failure."
Why we should never be afraid of failure for the reasons that we think.
The following passage is an excerpt from the beginning paragraphs in the introduction of James Dyson book, Invention. James Dyson is undoubtedly one of the more remarkable living human beings.
“In 1983, after four years of building and testing 5,127 hand-made prototypes of my cyclonic vacuum, I finally cracked it. Perhaps I should have punched the air, whooped loudly and run down the road from my workshop shrieking ‘Eureka!’ at the top of my voice. Instead, far from feeling elated, which surely after 5,126 failures I should have been, I felt strangely deflated.
How could this have been? The answer lies in failure. Day after day, with the wolf at the door, I had been pursuing the development of an ever more efficient cyclone for collecting and separating dust from a flow of air. I built several cyclones each day, conducting tests on each one to evaluate its effectiveness in collecting dust as fine as 0.5 microns − the width of a human hair is between 50 and 100 microns − while using as little energy as possible.
James asserts: "This might sound boring and tedious to the outsider. I get that. But when you have set yourself an objective that, if reached, might pioneer a better solution to existing technologies and products, you become engaged, hooked and even one-track-minded.”
I am reminded of the comment, "failure is an orphan but success has many parents." Napoleon Hill talks about the most common causes of failure as the habits of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat.
I am also fond of Henry Ford's assertion that "failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently." My mentor Venkatesh Rao in Be Slightly Evil laments, "You cannot be all noble and rise above the fray of the blame game. When a true failure looms, you must play or be played."
Success often co-exists with failure. In his 1943 novel, published in English as Magister Ludi (1949), Hermann Hesse anticipated the sort of world the humanists wanted - and its failure. The book depicts a brotherhood of intellectuals, artists, and humanists who live a life of splendid isolation, dedicated to the Great Tradition, its wisdom and its beauty. But the hero, the most accomplished Master of the Brotherhood, decides in the end to return to the polluted, vulgar, turbulent, strife-torn, moneygrubbing reality—for his values are only fool’s gold unless they have relevance to the world.
Julia Cameron in The Miracle of Morning Pages reminds us that modeling imperfection also models the faith to try again, to begin anew. In every creative life there are setbacks, and the successful people are not the ones who never fail but the ones who get up and try again after their failures. The faster we can get up, the better.