Hilary Mason Quotes

We must improvise, and we must experiment, and we must do things that might go wrong, and everything we bring - the people and the equipment - must serve us in that goal.

I think if I try to develop a formula, it ends up not working.

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.

The possibilities for creation and insight are endless. We're constantly collecting more data, and it's starting to be very relevant to our lives.

An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.

You've got to experiment to figure out what works.

The answers to today's most important scientific, business, and social problems lie in data.

You need to be experimental. You try things, and it is OK if they don't always work necessarily.

I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was; which was, let's keep throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and see what sticks.

You get the idea. Every business, like a painting, operates according to its own rules. There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once. There are no rules. You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it's because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over. It's the greatest thrill in the world and it runs away screaming at the first sight of bullet points.

To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.

If you're cooking and not making mistakes, you're not playing outside your safety zone. I don't expect it all to be good. I have fat dogs because I scrap that stuff out the back door.

Improvising things is always changing. A lot of momentum.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

You just go for it and see what works. There are no rules.

I have ideas that I think might be amusing, and I try them, and if they look right, I carry them out, and if they don't, I throw them out and try something else. I don't agonize about it.

You come for the money, you don't come to Barefoot College. You come for the work and the challenge, you'll come to the Barefoot College. That is where we want you to try crazy ideas. Whatever idea you have, come and try it. It doesn't matter if you fail. Battered, bruised, you start again.

If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up.

In order to be creative you have to be allowed to fail.

I have always believed that it's important to show a new look periodically. Predictability can lead to failure.

I think you can have a ridiculously enormous and complex data set, but if you have the right tools and methodology then it's not a problem.

It is the essence of innovation to fail most of the time.

When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.