Quote: Eleanor Roosevelt on not regretting mistakes

“I have never regretted even my mistakes. They all added to my understanding of other human beings, and I came out in the end a more tolerant, understanding, and charitable person.” - The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

The Amazing Race is all about "mistakes and miscalculations"

This whole race is a comedy of errors... and [winning requires] accepting each others' errors and making up for them later.

Chip & Reichen, outside an airport in India, on The Amazing Race season 4, which they eventually won.

A.A. Milne talks the value of strategic sloppiness

In a recent discussion with Paul Schoemaker, he mentioned the value of "strategic sloppiness" - in other words, not being too perfect; allowing some disorder to come into your work to allow collisions that may generate new solutions. The epitome of this approach is Alexander Fleming's unclean lab that spawned the discovery of penicillin.

Then I stumbled across this quote from Winnie-the-Pooh author A.A. Milne that sums up the value of strategic sloppiness. It is quoted in the new book Talent Wants To Be Free by Orly Lobel:

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go"

“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” TS Eliot, from the preface to The Collected Poems of Harry Crosby.

Hat tip @richardbranson (https://twitter.com/richardbranson/status/392677924060405760)

Richard Diebenkorn: "Mistakes can't be erased but..."

Great quote from painter Richard Diebenkorn as quoted by Maria Popova in Brain Pickings. From Diebenkorn's handwritten "Notes to myself on beginning a painting":

Mistakes can't be erased but they move you from your present position.

Steve Martin: Naïveté is necessary to developing your creativity

Another great quote from "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life." There are echoes here of the entrepreneur's necessary delusion referred to in Dan Isenberg's "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value."

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

Mistakes anchor you to the past until you own them"

A neat post from Dan Rockwell on Leadership Freak. Here's the money quote, for me:

Futures emerge after mistakes are owned, not until. Mistakes anchor life in the past until you say, “I screwed up.”

See more on owning mistakes here.

Eagles' Don Henley: "Success can be just as frightening as failure"

From the great documentary "History of the Eagles," from the mouth of introspective drummer/vocalist Don Henley:

Success can be just as frightening and disconcerting as failure.


Related post: "Eagles Reunion Concert Set Right By a Mistake"

Arthur Ashe: "You've got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing"

You've got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing.

Arthur Ashe, US Open & Wimbledon Tennis champion.

Seeing this quoted on Twitter resonated based on my recent reading of "Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation" by Ralph Farson and Ralph Keyes. Farson and Keyes discuss the idea that the highest levels of engagement in a project trump the idea of specific success or failure, and Ashe says pretty much the same thing. For me, I needed to get to my forties, and absorb a fair amount of both success and failure, to appreciate what Ashe is saying.

There are many references to this quote, but I can't find its origin - whether in one of Ashe's books, or in an interview. If you know, leave us a comment. Thanks!

When stuck creatively, "try to do some BAD work"

Excerpt from a letter by the artist Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse. Hat tip to Gwarlingo.

Try to do some BAD work – the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell – you are not responsible for the world – you are only responsible for your work – so DO IT. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be…

This quote gets me thinking of deliberate mistakes - actions you take counter to your ingrained thinking, to explore your boundaries and challenge your assumptions. For creative people, this is great advice. But for those who don't think of themselves as "creatives," are there times when this attitude can be helpful? I wouldn't recommend telling your boss to take a flying f--- or stroll into a meeting 20 minutes late just to see what would happen. But, perhaps there are things you can do:

• Write your status report as if you were explaining to your teenaged child what you did this week.
• Consider one area at work that has always bugged you, and write down four suggestions for fixing it.
• Put yourself in your subordinates' shoes - what two or three things would you want your boss (you!) to do to support you and your work?
• Sort all your responsibilities into three categories: Investment activities that enhance your long-term career and personal objectives; Neutral activities which are necessary to do well but don't require "A" grade work; and Optimize activities for which C-grade work is fine and excellence won't yield any incremental benefit. What percentage of your time are you spending on each category? (See my resolutions post for more on this.)

What would you recommend to make your work "anything you want it to be"?

Geithner: "Decide which mistakes are easier to correct"

Outgoing US Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, in an interview with the Economist. Geithner has been at the US Treasury through many crises, most recently the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

You are going to make mistakes, so you have to force yourself to decide which mistakes are easier to correct. In a crisis, you get to a point where you have to decide that you're going to risk doing too much, because it's easier to clean that up.

H/T Fradique Gonzalez

Mistake tweet of the day

https://twitter.com/nancybaym/status/294746838341386241

"It is imperfection — not perfection — that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain"

"It is imperfection — not perfection — that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain."

Nobel-Prize-winning researcher Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, from her autobiography as quoted in the New York Times. Dr. Levi-Montalcini died last week at age 103.

"You look for one thing and find something else"

"That's the way it goes sometimes: you look for one thing and find something else." Sancho Panza.

Don Quixote, Vol 1, chapter 16

From the Burton Raffel English translation of "Don Quixote."

This echoes the Ira Glass - via Kathryn Schulz - definition of a story (and one of the ways to view a mistake that I emphasize in the upcoming Mistake Bank book).

Don Quixote: "In every disaster, fortune always leaves a door ajar"

"In every disaster, fortune always leaves a door ajar."

Don Quixote, Vol 1, chapter 15

For the past few years, I've picked out a long classic novel to read as the days grow short. Last year it was "Anna Karenina" (one of my top books of 2012). And this year it's the Burton Raffel English translation of "Don Quixote."

And now, after so many years have passed since first reading, Cervantes seems to be writing about the power of mistakes and delusions. The above quote underlines that point.

Decathlon champion discusses failure in business

From the New York Times obituary of 1956 Olympic decathlon champion Milt Campbell, who died this past Friday. This quote establishes Campbell's sense of agency that likely fueled his athletic drive as well:

[Campbell] later became a motivational speaker, with failure in business as his own motivation. “When I lost all my money in the meat-trucking business in 1976,” he told The Times in 1980, “I realized that I understood about success and failure. I realized that it had nothing to do with anyone else, only me.”

"Regrets are about the things you wanted to try and didn't"

From the New York Times "Boss" column. This is JuE Wong, CEO of skin-care products company StriVectin:

To me, regrets are not about failures; they’re about things you wanted to try and didn’t. Because I never felt guilty about my choices and my husband was behind me, I was able to do my best.

A poignant note to this quotation is that Wong's husband, died suddenly just after she had reached the CEO level in 2009, at a prior company. Her career success has clearly been a team effort.

"Nothing is a mistake"

Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail. There's only make.

#6 in "Some Rules for Students & Teachers," from Sister Corita Kent, via @brainpicker.

"Failure is not the opposite of success"

This quote is from Dean Shepherd's book, "From Lemons to Lemonade: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Success Out of Your Mistakes." Shepherd is a professor at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and studies decisionmaking and cognition, focusing on learning from experimentation and failure.

Failure is not the opposite of success. Failure at specific projects occurs on the way to overall success - success in kindergarten, school, career, and life. The key is to learn and keep trying.

"Success is success but that is all that it is"

From the New York Times review of Henry Petroski's book "To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure":

People who study the ecology of innovation say one of our biggest advantages may be our willingness to accept failure, however distressing, as an inevitable byproduct of ambition. In the United States, if some unanticipated factor causes your good idea to fail, relatively little stigma attaches to you. In fact, you will hear people in Silicon Valley say that if you have not gone bankrupt at least once or twice, you’re not trying hard enough.

“Success is success but that is all that it is,” Dr. Petroski writes. It is failure that brings improvement.