Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
May 2012
April 2012
- [VIDEO] Harrison and the Diving Board
- The Tasty Failure of Oranges
- What's in a Band Name
- The Upside of Being Dishonest
- A Case For Failing
- From Broke to Multimillionare
March 2012
- [VIDEO] The Most Famous, Unused Poster
- How Angry Birds Became Successful
- Vendor Says: Failure Is a Huge Success
- Winning the Rejection Game
- Fred Astaire on Making Mistakes
- Roundoff Error: Failure and Success
- [VIDEO] Dr. Kate on Failure
February 2012
- Where The Sun will Finally Shine
- Use Errors, Make Training Efficient
- Unfinished, But Inhabited
- The Success of Failure, via CNN
- Einstein Actually Had Excellent Grades
- The Physics of Discarded Paper
- The Power of Failing
January 2012
- Offensive Advertising, Increased Sales?
- I Sold Out For Millions, Then Worked At McDonald's
- Steve Jobs on Failure
- The Famous Western Failure
- Thank Goodness for Drug Addicts
December 2011
The Success of Failure, via CNN
We assume that successful people are those that make the smartest choices and the least mistakes. But a new CNN article about creativity points out that failure is the secret to success.
To quote from The success of failure: Pulitzer winner’s surprising road to the top:
Failure. It’s such an ugly word, isn’t it? It reeks of cancer, of loss: the sense that what once went wrong cannot be set right, that the world has come to an end, that failures are failures forever — that it’s not just the project that failed, but you. Successful people, we imagine, are somehow blessed with more optimism, bigger brains and higher ideals than the rest of us.
But it’s not true. Successful people — creative people — fail every day, just like everybody else. Except they don’t view failure as a verdict. They view it as an opportunity. Indeed, it’s failure that paves the way for creativity.
The article continues with more stories about the importance of failure.
Plugging away — with no guarantee of success — is not advice people like to hear. Iain Roberts, a principal with the design consultancy IDEO, says some clients have to be educated that “you have to be OK with failing.” Clients naturally want to play it safe, but sometimes the most interesting ideas are out on the fringes. For example, he says, a cell phone provider might want to focus on established users, but what about trying to market to people who don’t own cell phones at all?
“It’s always a risk,” he says. But a necessary one: “If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing hard enough.”
Failure is the secret to success. Buy the book and learn more about the paradoxical power of doing what you think won’t work.
