“...IT’S PRETTY OBVIOUS, THE MIDDLE TOP IS THE SWEET SPOT”
Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries...” In the same vein, British economist William Stanley Jevons also stated “In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous ones.”
Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries...” In the same vein, British economist William Stanley Jevons also stated “In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous ones.”
Error is
one of the 7 reoccurring patterns associated with innovation, which Steven
Johnson detailed in his book Where Good Ideas Come From. Indeed, it takes an enlightened mind to see error as a smooth
path to innovation.
When you
win, you will probably throw a party, I’d guess. However, when you lose, it
triggers a totally different action – you ponder, you question, you explore,
and challenge assumptions. Verily, nothing begs innovation than the
aforementioned quadruplets. William James. Quoted: “The error is needed to set
off the truth, as much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the
brightness of a picture”.
According
to legend, Thomas Edison carried out 1000 experiments before he invented the
light bulb. In other words he failed 999 times! That’s humongous for one
experiment. Think about this, an error means a deviation from correctness, so
if there is probably one – or very few ways – to make the bulb light up, and
say, there are two thousand potent theories to try out. How the hell will he get to the correct 1
without ‘getting drenched’ in errors? Well, math tells us it’s possible – with
a probability of 0.0005.
Edison
knew he had to tolerate failure because the path to correctness is riddled with
errors.
The
message should not be misconstrued, errors are to be avoided when possible, but
the nature of most problems make error inevitable.
Visualize
a graph with an inverted U curve, which plots success on the y axis and error
on the x axis. You don’t want to be at the two extremes – bottom left or right.
The bottom left spot rarely exist (that’s the pith of this article) and for the
bottom right: run from that. That occurs when you don’t plan and make
degenerative mistakes as opposed to generative errors. It’s pretty obvious – the
middle top is the sweet spot.
0 comments:
Post a Comment