Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most

To move the needle—or to convince people to ask whether the needle might need moving in the first place—few tools are as compelling as experiments.

If you’re failing much more than once in every five or six attempts, you’re probably failing too often; and if you almost never fail or fail rarely, you’re probably not failing often enough.

Mastering the anxiety and discomfort that follow these failures is essential—and it’s one of the major differences between people who achieve breakthroughs, and those who stay mired indefinitely.

Contrary to the entrepreneurial myth that you have to be first—that if you don’t succeed early, you’re doomed to fail—it’s often best to enter a mature market whose kinks have been ironed out through early failures.

This one-in-five-or-six failure metric is a useful guide when you’re learning a new skill, particularly as technology

Experimentation is known as a divergent process.

The second lens is the production lens, which instead sees creativity as the outcome of hard work.

‘The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency—feeling

Close famously claimed, “Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.”