Two great entrepreneurs, separated by a century, offer some great insights about failure.
Thomas Edison remarked on his struggles with the light bulb “I have not failed 10,000 times- I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.
Bill Gates warned “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into think they can’t lose.”
Many worry that we’ve created a “winner take all” society. Maybe it’s time that we learned to appreciate failure’s necessary role in the realization of success.
A new traveling exhibition does just that. At the “Museum of Failure” you can revisit the lessons learned from the failure of the Ford Edsel (shown above), New Coke, Colgate Toothpaste’s weird foray into frozen TV dinners and why Bic thought that pens created just for women were a good idea (they weren’t).
Learn how The Museum of Failure Celebrates Some of the World’s Biggest Flops. (There are some links for deeper dives on individual products that failed which may be instructive.)
Speaking of Edison, if you’d like to learn about his inventions that didn’t make the grade, check out 7 Epic Fails Brought to You By the Genius Mind of Thomas Edison .
If a few “epic fails” are the price for what Edison gave us, it was well worth it.
