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Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

You can deal with failure. Sure it's tough, but you just work hard and try to get going again. But success -- success is an opiate. A lot of people can't handle it.

Success represents the 1 percent of your work which results only from the 99 percent that is called failure.

Leaders pay a lot of lip service to the notion of rewarding failure, but few organizations hold failed effort on the same level with success. Often, they have a forgive-and-forget policy. Forgiveness is crucial, but it's not enough. In order to learn from mistakes, it's even more important to forgive and remember. The only kind of failure that deserves to be punished is inaction.

Note: Darwin Magazine is now dead. Some articles are moving to CIO. I will try to update the links when I have time...

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The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

The man who does not make mistakes is unlikely to make anything.

Whom the gods want to destroy, they send 30 years of success. In the midst of your success, the seeds of failure are sown, and the signals are often very subtle.

One of the most misleading lessons imparted by those who have reached their goal is that the ones who win are the ones who persevere. Not always. If you keep trying without learning why you failed, you'll probably fail again and again. Perseverance must be accompanied by the embrace of failure. Failure is what moves you forward. Listen to failure.

Dismal failure is if you had an idea, you didn't plan it very well, you executed it really poorly, and after you failed, you felt sorry for yourself. Noble failure is if you had an idea, you planned it well, you executed it well, it failed. And then you said, 'What can we learn from this?'...

In the final analysis, when we fail it is not from lack of knowledge. It is, instead, from lack of wisdom to apply the things we already know. We don't fail because we don't know what to do. We fail because we don't do what we know.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

When you win, you don't examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You can easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard you've worked and howÂ…talented you are; it doesn't particularly define you beyond those characteristics. Losing, on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among the things it measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyze your failure, or just complain about bad luck?

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever.

The mistake that most [finance teams] make is assuming that forecasts are about predicting and controlling future outcomes. The purpose of forecasting is to inform decision making (to help shape future outcomes), not to predict the future. In reality, forecasting is necessary only because organizations cannot react instantly to changing events. That's why fast reaction is more important than (even accurate) prediction - because accuracy is rarely achieved. Indeed, the only certainty about a forecast is that it will be wrong. The question is by how much. Narrowing that variation comes from learning, experience, decent information systems, and ultimately, judgment.

Outsiders think of Silicon Valley as a success, but it is, in truth, a graveyard. Failure is Silicon Valley's greatest strength. Every failed product or enterprise is a lesson stored in the collective memory. We don't stigmatize failure; we admire it.

Everything can look like a failure in the middle.

We use a series of tests and evaluations that produce data that often proves we don't have a workable solution. The rest of the world would characterize this as a failure. I would characterize this as an exhaustive study of many ways to apply technologies to needs to determine those that fit and those that do not. It's a mistake to make decisions solely by counting up the number of successes compared to failures in this process. Often, big companies do that, basing decisions on the idea of maximizing the number of concepts that succeed verses those that fail. I would say you have to change the metrics. Success is two-fold:-first, getting through the evaluation and decision process quickly and efficiently without allowing team members to be damaged by failure; and second, finding a match between great technology and a really important need. Everyone will have gone through the travails of the various alternatives considered and everyone will share in the success when that project becomes a product.

Success is a ruthless competitor for it flatters and nourishes our weakness and lulls us into complacency. We bask in the sunshine of accomplishment and lose the spirit of humility which helps us visualize all the factors which have contributed to our success.

Failures in business are caused by self-centeredness, lack of righteousness, ignorance of the sacred mission of business, treating business as a short-sighted profit-making endeavor, and clinging to outmoded practices.

On the subject of reflection, Barbara Corday said, "Unfortunately, too often it's people failures that get them to reflect on their experiences. When you're going along and everything is working well, you don't sit down and reflect. Which is exactly the moment when you should do it. If you wait for a giant mistake before you reflect, two things happen. One, since you're down, you don't get the most out of it, and two, you tend only to see the mistake, instead of all the moments in which you've been correct."

...It's true. Most of us are shaped more by the negative experiences than by positive ones. A thousand things happen in a week to each of us, but most of us remember the few lapses rather than our triumphs, because we don't reflect. We merely react...

Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they will have a goÂ…they are not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is being creative. But what we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time we get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And now we're running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said, 'All children are artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.'

I think most big errors are errors of omission rather than errors of commission. They are the ones that companies never get held to account for—the times when they were in a position to notice something and act on it, had the skills and competencies or could have acquired them, and yet failed to do so. It's the opposite of sticking to your knitting: It's when you shouldn't have stuck to your knitting but you did.

Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is fear of failure.

He who have never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers – it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small.

Organizational learning efforts typically emphasize drawing lessons from a firm’s own or other high-profile firms’ successes, with a focus on ‘best practices’ and ‘getting things right.’ Rarely does management endeavor to learn from failure.While corporate leaders often participate in task forces to uncover the causes and lessons of highly-visible failures such as the Enron or Parmelat scandals, they rarely attend to mounting problems that, if detected and addressed, might avoid such catastrophies.

In fields like engineering and science, it has long been recognized that failure can be far more valuable for learning than success. This is because causal inference requires the opportunity to link actions to both positive and negative results. A firm that experiences only success will be unable to infer the causes responsible for it. In the absence of failure, the learning that follows success can transform from a source of further success into a source of failure.

Failure is frightening and understandably avoided by most people. Success drives our common approach to effectiveness, so we quickly learn to steer away from failure’s pressures. But failure is a more constant companion when we venture into the alternative world.Unfortunately, each comforting step we take to conserve success distances us from the chance to innovate, to be original, and to step outside the status quo. When guided by common views of effectiveness, the inevitable failures associated with creativity often discourage our dreams.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

Be stubborn in the face of failure. Instead: Be determined in the face of disbelief.

The doubters are inevitable and the odds are stacked against entrepreneurs and startups, thus it is crucial to believe in yourself, your company and your solution. Yet that determination can become our biggest weakness when it manifests itself as stubbornness or inflexibility; we can learn more through failures than successes.

The difference between determination and stubbornness is the difference between ignoring people and ignoring results.

If companies genuinely want to move from knowing to doing, they need to build a forgiveness framework – a tolerance for error and failure -- into their culture. A company that wants you to come up with a smart idea, implement that idea quickly, and learn in the process has to be willing to cut you some slack.