Innovation Cafe with Gary Shuster, patent litigator and prolific inventor.
Transcript
I want to talk about a weird part of creativity, and I’m going to call it dishes and do-overs. So we are all familiar with the phenomenon where you have something that you eat and you let it dry on the dish rather than washing it off straight away. And what you find is it’s really hard to get that dish clean again. It’s a lot of work, but if you wash it right away, it’s very easy to do something different with it. Well, it’s the same thing in life. You’re going to fail. Everyone does.
The most successful people in the world often credit their prior failures for their ultimate success. But here’s the trick when you fail at something, don’t let it dry in place like that food on the plate you forgot to wash. Instead, take the steps you need to take to set yourself up for your next try before that failure starts to get sticky and hard and difficult to move past. So fail away because that’s on the path to success. But don’t let the failure become a barrier. Talk to you next time.