by Robert Gore
The lives of men and women who rise to the top of their fields are replete with…failure. The best hitters in baseball trudge back to the dugout six out of ten times. Basketball’s high scorers miss half their shots. Several rockets blew up before the US put a man on the moon. Only a small percentage of Edison’s experiments yielded useful inventions. Despite years of deep theorizing, Einstein never came up with a unified field theory. Doesn’t all this suggest that failure may be essential for success, and the odium with which it’s tainted undeserved?
Evolution, science, and markets are instructive. Nature throws blobs of genetic variation at the wall and sees what sticks. For every mutation that increases a specie’s chances for survival via natural selection, there are thousands that either have no effect or are detrimental.
In the same vein, science is basically a series of better errors. Somebody comes up with a theory that seems to describe reality more accurately and has more predictive power than the generally accepted theory. Everybody takes their theoretical and empirical potshots, and if the theory is still standing it becomes the standard…until somebody finds a hole in it and the progression plays out again. Logically, there can be no enshrined truths in science (other than that there are no enshrined truths), only hypotheses and theories open to question and subject to disproof, but never conclusively confirmed for time and all eternity.
American Motors, Brown Shoe, Studebaker, Collins Radio, Detroit Steel, Zenith Electronics and National Sugar Refining were all in the Fortune 500 in 1955. None of them exist today. Of that Fortune 500, only 61 were still around 60 years later. That’s economist Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” the ceaseless roiling of the competitive landscape in a healthy (i.e., capitalistic) economy that destroys some businesses and elevates others, but places none on a permanent plateau. Successful people in business know in their bones this catechism: try, fail, admit, analyze, get up, try again.
