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About this quote

What does it mean?
Failure teaches us what works by showing what doesn't, and mistakes are necessary for discovery.
In plain terms
You learn more from failures than from success.
What can you take from it?
Mistakes are essential for learning and discovery.

Where it applies

  • scientific research
  • career development
  • problem solving

Putting it to work

  • embrace mistakes
  • analyze failures
  • experiment freely

Questions to consider

  • What did a failure teach you?
  • Is failure necessary to succeed?

Another view

Some mistakes carry costs too high to learn from them safely.

More from Samuel Smiles

  1. 'Heaven helps those who help themselves' is a well tired maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of a vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is…

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  2. We often discover what WILL do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

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  3. No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.

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