How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Recorded Michael Houghton said elsewhere, not written here
[Laughs] It was hard. I was working at a biotech company in California, as you may know, and so biotech companies in the States, they want results, right? They have investors that give a lot of money, and they want results sooner than later, especially in the US. So you know it’s great that the company I worked at was willing to work on it and to persist in funding it, and all of our venture capitalists and so forth. And I think in a real way it was a testament to the power of the biotechnology industry, but also it was a lot of pressure on me to manage the programme and to keep it going, with years and years of failure basically. Yeah, so I got pretty desperate: ‘Surely we’ll do it before this one’s completed!’. [Laughs]

Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded shortly after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 October 2021 source ↗

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Joan Didion American writer
Yeah. It’s a grandiose reaction. You are claiming you could really control this, but you failed.
Recorded Academy of Achievement, Academy of Achievement interview, New York, New York, 1 April 2005 source ↗
Robert S. Langer Biomedical engineer; Institute Professor at MIT
In fact, what I usually say to people, “Probably some of the most successful scientists are the ones that know how to deal with failure well.” Because it’s easy to feel good when you succeed. That’s an easy thing. But you’re probably going to fail in science a lot more than you succeed, so you really have to learn how to deal with it and not let it beat you.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview, 25 October 2012 source ↗
Jocelyn Bell Burnell Radio astronomer; discoverer of pulsars
My contemporaries were more upset about the Nobel than I was not to be recognised. One of them labelled it the 'No-Bell' prize! But it was fine by me. There's no Nobel Prize in astronomy and I was really proud that it was my stars that had convinced the prize committee that there was good physics in astrophysics.
Recorded Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020 source ↗
Steve Jobs Co-founder and chief executive of Apple; co-founder of NeXT; chief executive of Pixar
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
Recorded Stanford University 114th Commencement, Stanford News (Stanford University), 12 June 2005 source ↗

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Richard Feynman, Frederick Sanger, Norman Borlaug, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Peter Doherty, Daniel Kahneman

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