No, no. Well, you know, biology is such a complex system. It’s totally different from the engineering. We cannot design. Many people tried to find the therapy for cancer, but all failed. And myself, I never expected my research, working on the immune system, would lead to the cancer therapy. But, in a sense, I’m very fortunate that I also thought about it. You know, you have to try many things and if you’re lucky you can hit, but you have to pursue. That’s my feeling.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Question
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
Craft & work
Question
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the best advice you have ever received?
Time & hindsight
I had such failure for the first ten years in Silicon Valley. General Magic — over a billion dollars invested in 1990 dollars! Could you imagine what that is today? The best team in the world. We were told we were gonna topple Microsoft and all these companies.
Academy of Achievement interview, 5 February 2016 source ↗
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Tasuku Honjo
Japanese immunologist and Nobel laureate
Recorded
Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded shortly after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 October 2018
source ↗
Well, maybe it was successful in the end. But, I mean, to get there - one of the things that I talk about is not to be afraid of failure because you're going to fail. And I was 19 years old. I was competing in the Mr. Universe contest, and I lost. I had movies that went in the toilet. I have had policy issues and referendums that went in front of the people that I lost. And, of course, in my personal life, you know, my marriage is a big loss. So there's a lot of losses and failures that I've had. And I think that it is important that we recognize that. But no matter what it is, I always had an exciting life and always chased something, and that made, to me, the whole thing worth it. I always felt I was enriched by the fact that I always knew where I was going. And then there were some things that were unexpected. Like, running for governor was something that kind of unfolded only because there was a recall election.
Derek Sivers
Founder of CD Baby; author of Anything You Want
In the end, I had to pay $3.3 million dollars to buy back that 90%.
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji
Co-founder of Andela and of Flutterwave; founding partner of Future Africa
Failure is the most likely outcome of entrepreneurship. Hence there is absolutely nothing wrong with failure. It is the default outcome. Success on the other hand is rare and unpredictable. Very few find it. However what can help entrepreneurs succeed is when an ecosystem learns from failure.
Recorded
Aboyeji's own verified LinkedIn account, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji on LinkedIn, 5 January 2024
source ↗
More from Tony Fadell
View profile →every time I heard the word “smart” attached to anything, it means it’s pretty dumb, because no one knows what it really does. They just add “smart” as a prefix to say, “Oh, you must buy this, because it’s smart.” If they can’t tell you what it does and why it does it, don’t buy it just because it says “smart.”
Learn by doing, not learn first, then do. The way you discover what it is you like to do in life is by doing first, then learning about it.
Elliot, he has such passion for what it was we were doing that he instilled that passion in me. He was like, “Just go for it. Make it happen.” And I would give him some wild idea, and he’d say, “Go try it.” It was that next set of just knocking down the fear of failure. Just go try anything.
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Brian Chesky, Drew Houston, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Daniel Ek, Jensen Huang, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji
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