Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

These failures are what business school professor Sim Sitkin calls “intelligent failures.” They happen when you’re exploring the edges, solving problems that haven’t been solved, and building things that may not work. We often speak of intelligent failures as losses. “I lost five years of my life.” “We lost millions of dollars.” But these are losses only if you call them that. You can also frame them as investments. Failure is data—and it’s often data you can’t find in a self-help book. Intelligent failures, if you pay them proper attention, can be the best teachers. These errors can have staying power that lessons from success often lack. Intelligent failures can produce a sense of urgency for change and produce the shock necessary to unlearn what we know. “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections,” Vilfredo Pareto wrote, “You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.”