It’s because, to return to our opening story, there is ultimately no way to know whether something works until you put it out there and see how your target audience reacts.

Failure is what could have happened; it’s a mistake performing without a safety net.

Americans often fail well, but this book will argue that we can fail even better, if we change the way we think about risk. We need a little more forager, a little less farmer—a little more forgiveness, a little less judgment.

America, by contrast, treats it like foraging: results are highly uncertain and always driven by luck, so if you fail, it’s a healthy sign that you were trying hard.

Europe, in short, treats entrepreneurial risk-taking like farming: success is a result of hard work and good planning, so if you fail, it’s because you did something wrong.

“We’re losing money on every unit, but we’ll make it up in volume!”

If I’d been sitting alone in my apartment, it would have been hard to convince myself that I was on the right track. But as long as I had someone else there who was willing to say that we might get married someday, I had just enough reason for optimism to keep on doing what I was doing.

Markets turn out to rely as much on morality as monetary policy; sociability can be as important as structure.

The question they thought they were asking was “If we replace Coca-Cola with this new soda, will you buy more of it?” But the only question their test could actually answer was “Which of these small samples would you prefer to drink in a parking lot, if I gave it to you for free?”