Edison Failure Quotes

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

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

Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.

Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.

43. Don’t let past failures determine what your future success will be. Walt Disney went bankrupt — twice — before finally gaining lasting momentum. The Beatles were rejected from numerous record labels, as was Tom Petty. Thomas Edison failed at creating the light bulb ten thousand times before getting it right! If he used failure as an indicator of his true path, you might be reading this by candlelight.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

I Failed My Way To Success.

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

[In any] machine, the failure of one part to cooperate properly with the other part disorganizes the whole and renders it inoperative for the purpose intended. —THOMAS EDISON R

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Albert Einstein didn’t speak until he was four years old and was considered not very bright. Oprah Winfrey was demoted from a news anchor job because she was thought to be unfit for television. Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for lacking imagination. Thomas Edison was called stupid by his teachers. The Beatles were told they didn’t have a great sound and rejected by Decca Recording Studios. Dr. Suess was rejected by twenty-seven publishers. Abraham Lincoln had a long list of failures, including eight election losses and a nervous breakdown.

1. Success is a choice. -Rick Pitino 2. Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in playing a poor hand well. -Warren Lester 3. I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment; it takes place every day. -Albert Camus 4. If you're not fired up with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm. -Vince Lombardi 5. There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity. -Douglas MacArthur 6. Yesterday's the past and tomorrow's the future. Today is a gift, which is why they call it the present. -Bill Keane 7. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure. -Thomas Edison 8. When you get to the end of your rope tie a knot and hang on. -Franklin D. Roosevelt 9. The best way to predict your future is to create it. -Author unknown 10. I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says, "Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest." I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have. -Harry S Truman 11. Triumph? Try Umph! -Author unknown 12. You hit home runs not by chance but by preparation. -Roger Maris 13. If you don't have enough pride, you're going to get your butt beat every play. -Gale Sayers 14. My mother taught me very early to believe I could achieve any accomplishment I wanted to. The first was to walk without braces. -Wilma Rudolph 15. You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. -Margaret Thatcher

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. —Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist

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.

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

Or as Thomas Edison put it, “Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

You only fail when you stop trying.

Let the failure of today be motivation to do Better Tomorrow.

The only real issue with these people, besides the occasional hygiene challenge, was that they always seemed to embrace failure as a positive outcome. “I have not failed,” they’d endlessly quote Edison, “I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” Which may be an acceptable thing to say in science but is absolutely the wrong thing to say to a roomful of investors looking for an immediate, high-ticket, chronic treatment for cancer. God save them from actual cures. Much harder to make money off someone who doesn’t have a problem anymore.

Many of life’s failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. Edison is a great example of someone who used deliberate and cognitive creativity.

When something is chance based, be stubbornly persistent. There’s no reason to quit a (free) chance-based venture. Ever. It’s irrational to quit unless it costs you something. It’s free to submit guest post articles, ask women to go to dinner with you, apply for dream jobs, or ask your boss for a raise. There can be many upsides if you get positive results, so take action without apologizing. Be the most aggressive person you know! When something fails, try a different approach. Concrete failure, as opposed to chance failure, gives you an opportunity to eliminate that way of doing things (Edison’s failed lightbulb prototypes are a popular example of this). When you suspect a negative result comes from a combination of chance and failure, be persistent, but try varying strategies to the degree that you think it’s failure.

My great concern,’ said Lincoln, “is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.” Thomas Edison had ten thousand failures before he invented the incandescent bulb. Edison made up his mind that each failure brought him that much closer to success.

Remind me what it was Thomas Edison said about failure." He knew Price would know. The boy was a walking encyclopedia. unforgivably smug in the understanding that he was, more often than not, the smartest person in the room. "I have not failed ten thousand times," he said, speaking over the muffled clash of swords, "Tve successfully found ten thousand ways that won't work.

The only real issue with these people, besides the occasional hygiene challenge, was that they always seemed to embrace failure as a positive outcome. “I have not failed,” they’d endlessly quote Edison, “I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” Which may be an acceptable thing to say in science but is absolutely the wrong thing to say to a roomful of investors looking for an immediate, high-ticket, chronic treatment for cancer.

By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation. But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius. His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative: assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere.

is Thomas Edison’s reply to his assistant (or a reporter), who asked Edison about his ten thousand experimental failures in his effort to create the first incandescent light bulb. “I have not failed,” he told the assistant (or reporter). “I successfully discovered ten thousand elements that don’t work.” Most American children, however, are denied the freedom to noodle around, experiment, and be wrong in ten ways, let alone ten thousand. The focus on constant testing, which grew out of the reasonable desire to measure and standardize children’s accomplishments, has intensified their fear of failure. It is certainly important for children to learn to succeed, but it is just as important for them to learn not to fear failure. When children or adults fear failure, they fear risk. They can’t afford to be wrong.

Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.” In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan. In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart. Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.

Why reinvent the light bulb Did you have a problem with the burning light? Thanks to Thomas Edison’s effort, we don’t need to invent a flashlight, we just go to the store or our closet and pull one out and fuck in. I’m sure you realize that Thomas Edison took many attempts before the lamp was mastered by someone who once asked him if he discouraged his failure and said, “Cut, I haven’t failed yet, I’ve discovered another way not to make a light lamp. You see, there’s nothing like failure, there’s just results. Someone once said that defining madness is doing something over and over and getting the same results. To do our lives right, we have to change the things we do. Just like light can burn, so we can. Life can become dark and depressed and we feel no light, no hope of sight. This picture is certainly not clear. Let me highlight this situation (intentional). When we feel down and deep in the hole, that’s when we need light to see our way through. Some of us are lucky enough to have some light on our hands, others have to come out and get it back. Many people try to invent light for themselves by thinking about positive ideas, but so far it takes them. It just gives a lot of light and there’s more light available, but people at a secondary level are about how to get it. We must not be like Thomas Edison, continue to look at the problem and think of ways to solve it. For every problem, there’s a solution. How do we find a solution? We can try, as we have said, to try to figure it out ourselves, or we can find someone who has already crossed this obstacle and do what they did. There are many books on the market today that can help us understand how to overcome obstacles in our lives. We have to read and learn from the failure of others, they’ve been through it before, and they can help teach us how to go through it. We all need more light in our lives and sometimes we can’t see light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s always hope and assistance. You know how others overcome their challenges and keep this education in you even when you feel weak and life seems bad. Don’t try to reinvent the light lamp. Learn how to carry light in yourself.

Thomas Edison dreamed of a lamp that could be operated by electricity, began where he stood to put his dream into action, and despite more than ten thousand failures, he stood by that dream until he made it a physical reality. Practical dreamers do not quit!

Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.  - Thomas Edison

Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison

It’s highly possible that before success comes, there may be some obstacles in your path. If your plans don’t work out see it as a temporary defeat, and not as a permanent failure. Come up with a new plan and try again. If the new plan doesn’t work out either, change it, adapt it until it works. This is the point at which most people give up: They lack patience and persistence in working out new plans! But watch out. Don’t confuse this with persistently pursuing a plan that doesn’t work! If something doesn’t work…change it! Persistence means persistence toward achieving your goal. When you encounter obstacles - have patience. When you experience setback - have patience. When things are not happening - have patience. Don’t throw your goal away at the first sign of misfortune or opposition. Think of Thomas Edison and his ten thousand attempts to make the light bulb. Fail towards success like he did! Persistence is a state of mind. Cultivate it. If you fall down, get up, shake off the dust, and keep on moving towards your goal.

Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they are to success when they gave up.” God has already given us the victory. Stand strong in that knowledge. In God’s economy nothing is ever wasted.

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this, you haven't.

Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely.” ~ Thomas Edison

It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure. T. Edison Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits. T. Edison There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. Buckminster Fuller Be alone: that is the secret of invention. Be alone: that is when ideas are born. N.Tesla Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. Steve Jobs Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you, because bad news is a headline and gradual improvement is now. Bill Gates If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time. Steve Jobs Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open. A.G.Bell An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. B. Franklin The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. A.Einstein That's been one of my mantras: focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean, to make it simple. But is's worth it in the end, because once you get there, you can move mountains. Steve Jobs We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work. T. Edison Let's go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday. Steve Jobs

I have not failed, I’ve just found ten thousand ways that don’t work.” (Thomas Edison); “You can win a lot in life just by being the last one to give up.” (James Clear); “Failure is success in progress.” (Albert Einstein). No

The truth is that one of the hardest things I had to learn is how to fail. Henry Petroski is an author and professor of civil engineering at Duke University. One of the overarching concerns in his books is the importance of failure and its importance in how we design and how we learn. Read his wonderful book, The Evolution of Useful Things. Inventors design things because they are driven by the perceived failure of a current design. Is a function being properly performed or can it be improved? Petroski understands the necessity of failure in order to push an idea forward, whether it be on an engineering problem or one of technique or design. He quotes Thomas Edison: “Genius. Sticking to it is the genius . . . I failed my way to success.

They needed it to nurture and that’s when I discovered that I needed failure to realize there’s something I need to modify for something better.

In 1917, during his later impoverished years, Tesla was told he was to receive the Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. He turned the medal down. “You propose,” he said, “to honor me with a medal which I could pin upon my coat and strut for a vain hour before the members of your Institute. You would decorate my body and continue to let starve, for failure to supply recognition, my mind and its creative products, which have supplied the foundation upon which the major portion of your Institute exists.

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.

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

Edison believed that he could harness electric energy and make it serve as a light. He stood steadfastly behind that belief through more than ten thousand failures and lived to see his belief justified, although others before him had tried to accomplish the same result and failed – failed, perhaps, because they lacked the capacity for unshakable belief.

Taking the time to learn from what went wrong is often the most cringe-inducing aspect of intelligent failure. Not all of us can remain as cheerful as Thomas Edison. You’re not alone if you feel disappointed or embarrassed, and it’s easy to want to push those feelings away. That’s why it’s important to reframe and resist blame and push yourself to be curious. It’s natural to fall prey to self-serving analysis—“I was right, but someone in the lab must have altered something”—which takes us away from discovery. But a true desire to learn from failure forces us to confront facts more fully and rationally. You’ll also want to avoid superficial analysis—“It didn’t work. Let’s try something else”—which generates random rather than considered action. Finally, avoid the glib answer “I’ll do better next time,” which circumvents real learning. What’s necessary is to stop and think carefully about what went wrong so as to inform the next act.

If the first plan which you adopt does not work successfully, replace it with a new plan, if this new plan fails to work, replace it, in turn with still another, and so on, until you find a plan which does work. Right here is the point at which the majority of men meet with failure, because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail. The most intelligent man living cannot succeed in accumulating money—nor in any other undertaking—without plans which are practical and workable. Just keep this fact in mind, and remember when your plans fail, that temporary defeat is not permanent failure. It may only mean that your plans have not been sound. Build other plans. Start all over again. Thomas A. Edison “failed” ten thousand times before he perfected the incandescent electric light bulb. That is—he met with temporary defeat ten thousand times, before his efforts were crowned with success. Temporary defeat should mean only one thing, the certain knowledge that there is something wrong with your plan. Millions of men go through life in misery and poverty, because they lack a sound plan through which to accumulate a fortune. Henry Ford accumulated a fortune, not because of his superior mind, but because he adopted and followed a plan which proved to be sound. A thousand men could be pointed out, each with a better education than Ford’s, yet each of whom lives in poverty, because he does not possess the right plan for the accumulation of money.

EDISON had the persistence to keep on trying in the face of ten thousand failures. —Andrew Carnegie

Thomas Edison is legendary for learning from his failures. So much so that he refused to even call them failures. In the 1890s, for example, Edison and his team were trying to develop a nickel-iron battery. Over the course of about six months, they created more than nine thousand prototypes that all failed. When one of his assistants commented that it was a shame they hadn’t produced any promising results, Edison said, “Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” This was how Edison looked at the world—as a scientist, an inventor, and a businessman. It was this kind of positive mindset, this sort of brilliant reframing of failure, that led Edison to the invention of the lightbulb barely a decade earlier and to the thousand other patents issued to him by the time he died.

Whenever an error pops up, the usual response is “Jeez, another screwup, what went wrong this time?” The creative thinker, on the other hand, will realize the potential value of errors, and perhaps say something like, “Would you look at that! Where can it lead our thinking?” And then he or she will go on to use the error as a stepping stone to a new idea. Indeed, the whole history of discovery is filled with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping stones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled on to the idea of interplanetary gravity because of assumptions which were right for the wrong reasons. Thomas Edison knew 1,800 ways not to build a light bulb. Freud had several big failures before he developed psychoanalysis. One of Madame Curie’s failures was radium.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” ―Thomas A. Edison

Embracing Failure WE NEED TO FAIL. Churches need to fail more. Leaders need to fail more. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has, since the 1990s, been hosting what he calls failure parties for scrapped research projects. 1 Edgy design company 5Crowd has a failure party every month—complete with failure high-fives and often wrapping up with a celebratory failure cake! 2 When venture capitalists assess whether to invest in a new idea, one of the key characteristics they look for is a previous failed startup. They prefer to invest in a leader who has already run a company into the ground.

Henry Ford, poor and uneducated, dreamed of a horseless carriage, went to work with what tools he possessed, without waiting for opportunity to favor him, and now evidence of his dream belts the entire earth. He has put more wheels into operation than any man who ever lived, because he was not afraid to back his dreams. Thomas Edison dreamed of a lamp that could be operated by electricity, began where he stood to put his dream into action, and despite more than ten thousand failures, he stood by that dream until he made it a physical reality. Practical dreamers DO NOT QUIT! Whelan dreamed of a chain of cigar stores, transformed his dream into action, and now the United Cigar Stores occupy the best corners in America. Lincoln dreamed of freedom for the black slaves, put his dream into action, and barely missed living to see a united North and South translate his dream into reality.

Great leaders are not infallible. What makes them great is their willingness to accept and rebound from failure. They see it as just part of the process that eventually leads to success.

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.

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

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.

Edison said, “Restlessness is discontent, and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure.”35

Thomas Edison once said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” President

The more Wayne inhabited Edison, the more he wondered how a man cultivates a stubborn streak so pronounced that it transforms a daily barrage of failures into stimulants.