celebrate failure

According to Edmondson, to call a failure intelligent, it must meet four criteria:

Relate to an area you don’t have knowledge in.

Be in pursuit of a goal.

Not be a random guess but hypothesis-driven.

Result in a failure that is as small as possible.

As Edmondson concluded: “It is natural to want to avoid failure. But when we avoid failure, we also avoid discovery and accomplishment. The only way to succeed in any endeavor worth trying is to be willing to experiment, to try new things, knowing full well that many of them will yield failures. We have to embrace those kinds of failures because... See more

These criteria also represent the type of failure scientists have had to relearn through their professional training. Biologist Stuart Firestein even argues that failure is the reason for science’s many successes. He says that the trial-and-error nature of science makes failure inevitable. Still, when failure is informative, it is nonetheless... See more