If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.

 

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.
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Attributed to Watson in: Ron van Oech (1982), A Whack on the Side of the Head and several other motivational books.
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Attributed to Watson in: Industrial participation (1987) Nr 594-603. p. 262

 

Thomas J. Watson

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It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits — like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding — inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.

 

Malcolm Muggeridge

 

The American system demands success, and in order to succeed we must first believe that we can. Yet our society, with its intolerance of failure and poverty, traps millions of people in positions where any kind of success seems impossible to contemplate, and in which failure itself is a kind of passive rebellion against their own misery and the social system which created it in the first place.
To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.

 

Michael Korda

 

...One of the things I have discovered is, in Washington, D.C. most people understand the consequences of failure. And if failure is not an option, then it's up to the president to come up with a plan that is more likely to succeed.

 

George W. Bush

 

The more congenial page of some tenth-rate poeticule worn out with failure after failure and now squat in his hole like the tailless fox, he is curled up to snarl and whimper beneath the inaccessible vine of song.

 

Algernon Charles Swinburne

 

If Hal Halpin really wanted kids not to buy mature-rated games, here is what he would do:
He would do his secret stings on his retail lobbyist organization's members, similar to those done by Dr. Walsh's NIMF and by the Federal Trade Commission.
Upon tabulating the results, his organization would fine members that did not score at least a 90% compliance with the ESRB rating system in the first wave of stings.
Upon a second failure of any retail chain not to comply, the results of the failure would be made public.
Upon a third failure to meet the 90% compliance rate, the retailer would be kicked out of the organization.
Will Halpin do anything like this? Of course not! He gets paid by the retailers to make a 42% retailer failure rate look like "success." Hal Halpin does not want kids not to get these games. He wants them to get them, and the proof is that nothing--NOTHING--is done by his organization to punish the scofflaws who thumb their noses at all the parents who don't want their kids to be able to walk into these stores and buy these mature games.
Hal Halpin is a phony, and anyone dimwitted enough not to know it is probably a gamer. Fondly, Jack Thompson

 

Jack Thompson