Creativity and Failure

"Creativity is a consequence of sheer productivity. If a creator wants to increase the production of hits, he or she must do by risking a parallel increase in the production of misses. ... The most successful creators tend to be those with the most failures!" Dean Keith Simonton

Robert Sutton wrote in Weird Ideas That Work, that "in a typical year this group of about 10 people generated just over 4,000 ideas (which they know because all ideas are tracked on a spreadsheet):

Of these 4,000 ideas, 230 were thought to be promising enough to develop into a nice drawing or working prototype. Of these 230, 12 were ultimately sold. This "yield" rate is only about 1/3 of 1% of total ideas and 5% of ideas that were thought to have potential. Boyle pointed out that the success rate is probably even worse than it looks because some toys that are bought never make it to market, and of those that do, only a small percentage reap large sales and profits. As Boyle says, "You can't get any good new ideas without having a lot of dumb, lousy, and crazy ones."'

No one should choose the option of failure deliberately, but trying especially hard to avoid it means taking no chances on change. The better message to get across is that failure is a by-product of risk-taking, and honest mistakes will be forgiven.

All of the above are from an article, Forgive and Remember, by Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life.

Rewarding Failure

At the highest levels of government and corporations, we have accepted a culture of rewarding failure.

That is why perhaps the best job in America is to be a failed CEO. You receive millions in severance and are once more given opportunities to either try it again, or serve on a board of directors where you can again escape accountability for failure.

Ron Ashkenas in an article entitled, A Dangerous Pattern: rewarding failure

Artists: failure and success

I like this quote, which was sent via Twitter from art shark's net:

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. ~Charles Horton Cooley.


Charles Horton Cooley (born Aug. 17, 1864, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. died May 8, 1929, Ann Arbor) was an nAmerican sociologist ad the son of Thomas M. Cooley. He studied and went on to teach economics and sociology at the University of Michigan, and he was a founding member and the eighth president of the American Sociological Association.

He is perhaps most well known for his concept of the looking glass self, which is the concept that a person's self grows out of society's interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others.

Failure, success, sex and evolution

Many of life's failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas Edison, source unknown, but quoted on page 216 0f The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow.

The Drunkard's Walk has the distinction of being the first book I read and actually finished in 2009. (Finished an Ian Rankin, but I think I started that in 2008.)

It's a fascinating book on stats, randomness, chance, the way in which ability doesn't necessarily equate to success (perseverance is more likely to, I think). The stats side of it fits in with what I've read on stats and what I do at work in relation to them - and is helpful in clarifying some of the issues with stats. Stats are useful, but they're never the last word.
The way in which randomness isn't quite as random as we like to think is another intriguing outcome of the book, and our willingness to turn a number of random acts into a pattern is another factor we need to take into account.

And in relation to this, here's another quote, this time from Will Catton, a PhD student from the University of Otago, (Dunedin, NZ) who won an essay prize for a piece called: Progress, Laughter, Sex - but not in that order. It was published in the latest NZ Listener magazine dated January 17, 2009

But the idea that sex is essentially a way of shuffling genes misses much of its real significance to biological progress. A spicy new source of amazingness was involved in the lives of your sexual ancestors: the amazingness of their each convincing some other ancestor of yours to fandango. The more finicky those other ancestors were, the more impressive this familial achievement becomes. Evolutionary success, for a sexual beast, is tested by the mating choices of the rest of the species as much as by survival. So sex is the species' biology grabbing the reins on its own evolution. Such control does create new dangers. Fashion is fickle: the peacock's tail, just like hammer pants and the 'hypothetical' speculative housing market, may well be in for a bumpy devaluation. But the immensely beneficial trade-off is this: a sexual species' evolution can be directed with all the subtlety of its members' ability to perceive one another. Sizzling health is nature's oldest aphrodisiac.

Catton is obviously in love with language, which might account for why some of this seems to make less sense than first appears. But the general idea is good.