Learning From History To Avoid Learning From Failure Is Good

“I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” Was said by Thomas Edison after a reporter asked him How did it feel to fail 1,000 times [when inventing the lightbulb]?” I really think failure is needed to further knowledge. But not every failure pushes the limits of human understanding.…


First published in MasonPelt.com on June 16, 2022.
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“I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” Was said by Thomas Edison after a reporter asked him How did it feel to fail 1,000 times [when inventing the lightbulb]?” I really think failure is needed to further knowledge. But not every failure pushes the limits of human understanding.

If you fail to bake a cake 1,000 times because you’re choosing not to follow a recipe or basic understanding of chemistry; you chose to fail 1,000 times. You could have at any point, made a cake by following directions written down by other people who successfully baked cakes in the past.

Saying “you win some you learn some” to justify choosing to fail over and over again, because you decided to ignore all prior knowledge is dumb. Think of all the things you could learn with the time you spent trying to figure out that sugar is sweet, and leaven makes bread rise.

Cakes are at least a fairly low-risk endeavor to waste time on. What happens if you try to rediscover how you avoid a bridge collapsing? It’s clearly preferable to learn from history whenever possible; this applies to everything.

Nearly everyone who learns to ride a bike will at some point fall off that bike before they can comfortably commute via bicycle. But it is, astoundingly unnecessary to learn by trial and error that you sit on the bike with the handlebars in front of you.

In Summary

Yes, failure is a part of success.

No, you are not awarded points for failing because you shrugged off expertise and prior knowledge.

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Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on June 16, 2022. Photo: “Danger of Death By Failing” by AlmazUK is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.