Tim Harford Quotes

How did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us - computers and cell phones and so on? There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered. And the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, 'speed to fail' should be every entrepreneur's motto. Success isn't born wholly-formed like Venus from a clamshell; it's developed through relentless trial and error.

The reason why the Wright brothers were successful wasn't because they had the most resources, but because they understood how invention works. You have to iterate quickly, and you should be prepared to fail. Because things often don't go as planned.

If you start your own thing, you can learn a lot really fast from doing things wrong.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something, and it doesn't work, and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet... Ultimately, you become commercially successful.

Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.

Failure is essential. Trial and error is necessary.

There are people who say that you can't experiment... That condemns you to failure.

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

We don't grow unless we take risks. Any successful company is riddled with failures.

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.

That's the way it is with entrepreneurial people. You try one thing, it doesn't work, you try another.

Entrepreneurs don't write a 100-page business plan and execute it one time; they're always experimenting and adapting based on what they learn.

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

The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

We shouldn't be afraid to fail- if we are not failing we are not pushing. 80% of the stuff in the studio is not going to work. If something is not good enough, stop doing it.

His failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.

You always want to try, in everything you do, to attempt something you've never tried before, and the only way to succeed at that is through failure, and the only way to succeed through failure is just banging your head against the wall over and over until you get to that interesting thing on the other side.

In medicine, or in science, you go down a path and it turns out to be a dead end, you really made a contribution, because we know we don’t have to go down that path again. In the press, they call it failure. And so people are unwilling to innovate, unwilling to take risks in government …

A pioneering culture, one that actually enjoys and is excited by experimentation, a culture that rewards experimentation even as it embraces the fact that it is going to lead to failure… And a long-term orientation is a key part of that. If everything has to work this quarter, then you’re by definition not going to be doing very much experimentation.

I've certainly had a number of failures along the way, depending on my own instincts and creativity, some fairly celebrated, at least during their time.

Sometimes you try different things when you play the best ones many times and you lost a few times, so you have to change sometimes.

When you're successful at something, you think that you need to continue to do what you're doing to get the same result. But I think in order to get better, sometimes you need some failures.

If everything you do works, then you're not taking many risks and probably aren't innovating either.