Edison 10000 Failure Quotes

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Failure is the breeding ground of innovation. How so, you say? Consider Thomas Edison's approach to failure: 'I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

We have heard the stories: Duke Ellington would say, “I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.” 5 Tennessee Williams felt that “apparent failure” motivated him. He said it “sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.” Many have heard that Thomas Edison told his assistant, incredulous at the inventor’s perseverance through jillions of aborted attempts to create an incandescent light bulb, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” 6 “Only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one. Many thanks . . .” read part of the rejection letter that Gertrude Stein received from a publisher in 1912.7 Sorting through dross, artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators have learned to transform askew strivings. The telegraph, the device that underlies the communications revolution, was invented by a painter, Samuel F. B. Morse, who turned the stretcher bars from what he felt was a failed picture into the first telegraph device. The 1930s RKO screen-test response “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little” was in reference to Fred Astaire. We hear more stories from commencement speakers—from J. K. Rowling to Steve Jobs to Oprah Winfrey—who move past bromides to tell the audience of the uncommon means through which they came to live to the heights of their capacity. Yet the anecdotes of advantages gleaned from moments of potential failure are often considered cliché or insights applicable to some, not lived out by all.

To define your success, it truly is define by what you believe is your failures. This is what can make you weaker or stronger. The choice is yours and yours alone. We must sometimes fail more than once to succeed, so that we may grow and learn to change everything. As Thomas Edison once said; “I have not failed 10,000 ways, I just found 10,000 ways that does not work.

I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.

Thomas Alva Edison, the great American inventor, once said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Edison knew the power of failure in giving us a feedback, on what we are doing wrong, and how we can improve ourselves. Many people we know are afraid of taking the first step, taking a risk and moving away from their comfort zone. They are afraid of the difficulty that the first step poises. Of