Failure is painful, but totally necessary. Usually you learn more through failure than through success. It also might reveal what needs to be fixed in order to move forward and try again. Isolate what caused the failure, and attack only that problem first. Also, remember, you’re not alone: you can learn from other people’s failures as they will learn from yours.
In 1957, while working to develop a new type of textured wallpaper, Alfred W. Fielding and Marc Chavannes tried trapping air bubbles between two plastic shower curtains. It failed as wallpaper. They then tried it as insulation for a greenhouse and failed again. In 1959 IBM introduced the 1401 computer which needed to be packed and shipped carefully — and bubble wallpaper finally found its calling as Bubble Wrap, the packing material.
|
“Stumbles loom rather large, the more I write. . . . But they’re very important. It’s like hitting the wrong note. You have to do something else. . . . You have to make something out of that error, do a really powerfully creative thing.”
— Toni Morrison