A decent proportion of your creations must fail

Expected failure sounds like a strange idea; after all, how many people want to be associated with a word like fail? If you don’t fail, however, you will become the best typewriter company in the world. If you pursue your dreams, you will experience numerous failures. But you will be on the learning curve that leads to stardom. Take the following examples:

Technology: During the tech boom, Cisco was the largest company in the world. In its early days, the company was rejected by an astonishing 76 venture capital firms before receiving funding.

Sports: Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time, but he was cut from his high school basketball team.

Fiction: John Grisham is one of the most successful novelists of all time. He was rejected by a couple dozen publishers before getting his first big deal. He actually sold copies of his first book, A Time to Kill, out of the trunk of his car.

Film: In 2009 Slumdog Millionaire won 8 Oscars. A year prior, the original producer, Warner Bros., lost confidence in the film. They sold half their investment to Fox Searchlight and later pulled the plug completely. If it wasn’t for Fox Searchlight, Slumdog would not have made it to the big screen.

Science: Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but he actually failed miserably along the way.

Navigating through chaos requires a deep understanding of what you can and cannot do. Failure is a part of this learning process. To accept failure, you need to find positive ways to interpret unexpected results. Here’s how Edison looked at it:

A decent proportion of your creations must fail.

Successful ideas first require excessive testing and experimental failure.