You might not have heard of MIT professor Gian-Carlo Rota but you should know Rota’s 10 Life Lessons. Rota was an internationally respected mathematician and philosopher, and an influential and admired teacher. He was credited with transforming the field of combinatorial logic into one with a wide range industrial applications – from computers to communications…
“We are made to persist. That’s how we find out who we are.” ― Tobias Wolff Earlier in my career, I preached the Silicon Valley mantra of “fail fast, fail often” as a way of encouraging incumbents to take more risk. I even catalogued motivational quotes about failure. Over time, I realized that failure was…
The odds are you’ve never heard of William L. McKnight. William McKnight joined Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M) in 1907 as an assistant bookkeeper. At the time, the company was only five years old but had already pivoted from mining corundum to making sandpaper. Persistence and innovation was in the company DNA from the…
Even though I’m an avid reader, I don’t make a dent in my reading backlog because new books arrive faster than I can read existing ones. I often ask people for recommendations or informal reviews when trying to decide what to read next. For that reason, I’ve never read ‘Mastery‘ by Robert Greene – too many…
As a way of encouraging my team to take more risks, I’ve been espousing the philosophy “Failure is the new black” and have been cataloging quotes on failure from famous people. But increased risk-taking doesn’t just come from pithy quotes, it helps to provide examples of people who failed… and thrived. Here are four such stories:…
After a lot of feedback on my earlier post, here are some more quotes about how failure is the new black: “Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn’t work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.” Roger Von Oech, American author “There…
A few years ago I wrote a series of posts with quotes about Performance Management (Feb 2009, Sept 2009, May 2010). Last week the Global Language Monitor announced that ‘404’ and ‘fail’ are the two most popular words of 2013. Given the popularity of failure, I thought I would catalog a few of my favorite quotes about…
I’m behind in my reading. More than 30 unread books are sitting on my office shelves and another one joins their ranks almost every week. In an attempt to break the logjam I opened one somewhat randomly and read this intriguing claim: “You can personally choose to become more successful by adopting five learnable habits, which, in…