Alan Kay Quotes

If you succeed at most of your activities, your goals are set much too low.

To come up short when you reach too far is not such a bad thing rather than not to reach at all, right?

In certain businesses, I would say 10 failures to one success is a perfectly acceptable ratio. Because the failures die pretty quickly, they're not that expensive, and the successes can be really huge.

I'd rather have huge success and huge failures than travel in the middle of the road.

If you're going to fail, you might as well fail at the big ones.

If you never try, you'll never know what you are capable of.

If you want to achieve a high goal, you're going to have to take some chances.

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

Expect more than others think possible.

Risk is to do something that 99 percent of the time would be a failure.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.

Success tends to go not to the person who is error-free, because he also tends to be risk-averse.

I think when you take the big swings - and I've done plenty of big swings that I was told were never going to work - those are always the things that break through.

It's better to set a big goal to try and then fail than to never set a goal in the first place.

You can't afford to be afraid of failure in this business.

... if you take a risk, two things will happen. People will laugh at you. Or you'll be way ahead of everybody else. And if that's what you're in it for, then you gotta take that risk.

I really believe that entrepreneurship is about being able to face failure, manage failure and succeed after failing.

In a world that's changing so quickly, you're guaranteed to fail if you don't take any risks.

If you haven't failed yet, you haven't tried anything.

When you try to do something big its hard to fail completely.

You can do bigger and bigger things. For what?

I like the challenge of trying different things and wondering whether it's going to work or whether I'm going to fall flat on my face.

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success.

If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.