[HN Gopher] Failure Is the Mother of Invention
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Failure Is the Mother of Invention
Author : prostoalex
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-06-20 16:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Paywall: https://archive.ph/g0EXi
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| And yet at most companies, you are not allowed to even
| contemplate such a crazy idea. Need for absolute certainty and
| stability generate conservative committees ( and committee
| members ), who loathe but to say anything definitive.
|
| Granted, I mostly saw it in banking, but I assume it is not that
| uncommon.
| SMAAART wrote:
| I think this is an OpEd for the book "Build: An Unorthodox Guide
| to Making Things Worth Making" by Tony Fadell
| atoav wrote:
| I am an improvisational musician. The key to invent from failure
| is to develope a ever present sense of observing oneself from the
| outside. The instead of being emberassed when something goes
| wrong, one can "feel" the potentials that might lurk in where it
| went wrong.
|
| John Cage once said: If you make a mistake, repeat it.
|
| A trumpeter getting stuck _once_ in a melody is clearly a
| mistake, them doing the same thing again, and then spinning the
| thing into a different direction is not only perceived as
| interesting, it is probably one of the moments where their true
| genius will become visible the most.
|
| Key to this is to not be too attached to the plan, but to the
| goal. The plan is that melody you had in mind, or on the sheet.
| The goal is to play interesting music. If the plan is in the way
| of playing interesting music, ditch it. If the an is no longer
| feasible because you fucked up, the plan needs to be adjusted.
|
| This sounds logical for music, but in all other domains (except
| maybe art and design) people have a very hard time ditching or
| adjusting the plans immidiately at the point of failure. Kill
| your darlings and you will get new ones.
| black_knight wrote:
| <<Once is a mistake. Twice is Jazz.>>
| amfortas7 wrote:
| One of the greatest piece of music of all time is the fruit of
| a blatant mistake: Keith Jarrett's Koln concert.
|
| Instead of the required Bosendorfer 290 Imperial, the
| organization team brought a smaller and badly tuned piano on
| stage. Jarrett - who was a bit of a diva at times - initially
| refused to play, but gave in, and the recording is the thing of
| legends.
| puranjay wrote:
| Improv of any kind, in general, is fantastic for learning how
| to fail publicly. I do a bit of improv comedy and its fantastic
| for getting you out to make a fool of yourself publicly. Some
| of the best work in improv comes from people failing and
| flailing and channeling that into something fantastic.
| csdvrx wrote:
| paywalled
| paulpauper wrote:
| this notion that you need to fail seems wrong. Facebook,
| Microsoft, google never came close to failing and never had big
| failures yet still had innovations.
| soSadm4n wrote:
| It's a poetic take on relativity and knowledge acquisition.
|
| Can't be here until you observed back there, because here does
| not exist without having moved from back there to here.
|
| Qualifying it as failure is subjective and crap poetry coupled
| to contemporary productivity culture. It's a success in that
| you learned. It's only a failure because it didn't unicorn.
| cableshaft wrote:
| > Facebook, Microsoft, google ... never had big failures
|
| Google: Wave, Orkut, Google+, Google Video, Google Glass [1]
|
| Microsoft: Band, Bob, Kin, Zune, Lumia, Windows 8 [2]
|
| Facebook: Poke, Parse, Beacon, Credits, Paper, Slingshot, Libra
| [3]
|
| That's just products. If you go into security breaches,
| lawsuits, and operating procedures, you could list several
| more.
|
| These companies are large enough to have big failures and still
| keep kicking, and have people start to forget the failures over
| time (I had forgotten several of these myself). But they
| definitely aren't immune to having big failures.
|
| [1]: https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2018/2/26/googles-product-
| fai...
|
| [2]: https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-failures-windows-vista-
| cortana...
|
| [3]: https://startuptalky.com/facebook-failed-products/
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| I think his point was their very first product was a success.
| No failures required.
| jjulius wrote:
| >I think his point was their very first product was a
| success. No failures required.
|
| Except those companies, or the people who founded them,
| also had early failures. For instance, Zuckerberg's
| original site was more akin to "Hot or Not" than Facebook
| and got shut down by Harvard. Gates certainly had failures,
| as did Larry and Sergey. Just because the company they
| founded was successful from inception doesn't mean it
| wasn't a struggle to figure out how to get there. It would
| be wild to me to assume that there are people out there,
| walking among us, who have never failed.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Gates was a teen, as was zuckerberg. They were tiny
| failures. I don't believe Larry or Sergey failed at
| anything much before google. It was a little problematic
| afterwards because their mental model for building
| businesses was pretty distorted by their immediate, crazy
| success.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| How many iterations of search engine algorithms were tried
| before finding a solution that beat the competition? Google now
| kills many of its own products that don't live up to
| expectations.
|
| Microsoft has had a number of failed products, even some
| versions of windows are considered to be failures.
|
| Each company has learned from the failures though, which I
| think is a main point of the article.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Facebook
|
| https://www.vox.com/2014/2/25/11623922/meet-facebooks-gravey...
|
| >Microsoft
|
| Zune
|
| >Google
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| sgarman wrote:
| This post makes me realize you really need to define success
| before you do anything else.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| Necessity is still the mother. Failure is the Mengele of
| invention.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOyIJVUaoeg
| julienreszka wrote:
| its not, necessity is
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