成功和失败
Most people consider success and failure as opposite, but they are actually both products of the same process. As a baseball player suggests, an activity which produce a hit may also produce a miss. It is the same with creative thinking; the same energy which generates good creative ideas also produces errors.If you learn that failing even a little penalizes you, you learn not to male mistakes. And more important, you learn not to put yourself in situations where you might fall. This leads you to conservative thought patterns designed to avoid the stigma our society puts on “failure”.
Most of us have learned not to make mistakes in public. As a result, we remove ourselves from many learning experience for those occurring in the most private of circumstances.
From the practical point of view, “to error is wrong” makes sense. Our survival in the everyday world requires us to perform thousands of small tasks without failure. Think about it: you wouldn’t last long if you were to step out in front of traffic or stick your hand into a pot of boiling water. In addition, engineers whose bridges collapse, stock brokers who lose money for their clients, and copywriters whose ad campaigns decrease sales won’t keep their jobs very long.
Nevertheless, too great an adherence to the belief “to err is wrong” can greatly undermine your attempts to generate new ideas. If you are more concerned with producing right answers than generating original ideas, you will probably make uncritical use of the rules, formulae, and procedures used to obtain theses right answers. By doing this, you’ll by-pass the germinal phase of the creative process, and thus spend little time testing assumptions, challenging the rules, asking what-if questions, or just playing around with the problem. All of these techniques will produce some incorrect answers, but in the germinal phase, these errors are viewed as necessary by-product of creative thinking. As the player would put it, “If you want the hits, be prepared for the misses.” That is the way the game of life goes.
As a matter of fact, the whole history of discovery is filled with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping atones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled onto the idea of interplanetary gravity because of assumptions which were right for the wrong reasons. And, Thomas Edison knew 1800 ways not to build a light bulb.
Errors serve another useful purpose: they tell us when to change directions. Negative feedback means that the current approach is not working, and it is up to you to figure out a new one. We learn by trail and error, not by trial and rightness. If we do things correctly every time, we should never have to change directions—we’d just continue the current course and end up with more the same.
Your error rate in any activity is a function of your familiarity with the activity. If you are doing things that are routine and have a high likelihood of correctness, then you will probably making very few errors. But if you are doing things that have no precedence in your experience or are trying different approaches, then you will be making your share of mistakes. Innovators may not bat a thousand—far from it—but they do get new ideas.
Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, has similar words: “ the way to succeed is to double your failure rate.
Errors, at the very least, are a sign that we are diverging from the main road to and trying different approaches.
There are places where errors are inappropriate, but the germinal phase of the creative process isn’t one of them. Errors are a sign that you are diverging from the well-traveled path. If you are not failing every now and then, it’s a sign you are not being very innovative.
If you make an error, use it as a stepping atone to a new idea you might not have otherwise discovered.
Differentiate between errors of “commission” and those of “omission”. The latter can be more costly than the former. If you ‘re not making any errors, you might ask yourself, “How many opportunities am I missing by not being more aggressive?”
Strengthen your “risk muscle”. Everyone has one, but you have to exercise it or else it will atrophy. Make it a point to take at least one risk every 24 hours.’
Remember these two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what does not work; and second, the failure gives you an opportunity to try a new approach.
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