Katha Pollitt Quotes

Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.

Nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success.

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

I have always said that you have to fail. If you do not fail, it means you have never taken enough risks.

Failure is a learning experience, and the guy who has never failed has never done anything.

When you prohibit failure, you kill innovation. If you kill innovation in fundraising, you can't raise more revenue. If you can't raise more revenue, you can't grow. And if you can't grow, you can't possibly solve large social problems.

Failures are life's way of nudging you and letting you know you are off course. Trying new things and not being afraid to fail along the way are more important than what you learn in school.

You have to be prepared for people to hate you. Average people love to be average, because nobody bothers them.

It was a mistake and I made the mistake because I was conservative and played safe. And that way lies failure." "Must do it... constantly go to the well... constantly try, try, try. Dare. Dare, Dare. Who dares wins.

Comedy can't live within my second-guesses, so I started doing new material. Sometimes I bombed. But you have to be willing to if you want to move forward and stay vital. It's like people who take pride in not having a computer. I'm all, "Great, don't learn new things! Your brain is full!"

We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off.

People ask me, "How do I succeed?" Whatever it is they do, I say, "Go and find 20 ways of messing it up. By 21, you'll be getting there." Life is an adventure, go back with cuts, scars and bruises.

If everything you try works, you aren't trying hard enough.

Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing.

Failure is a badge of honor. It means you risked failure. And if you don’t risk failure, you’re never going to do anything that’s different from what you’ve already done or what somebody else has done.

When I've tried to reinvent the wheel, I get bashed for not doing the familiar things.

We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee to fail intelligently... to experiment over and over again and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

Failure is essential. Trial and error is necessary.

You accept failure as a possible outcome of some of the experiments. If you don't get failures, you're not pushing hard enough on the objectives.

We need some great failures. Especially we ever-successful Americans - conscious, intelligent, illuminating failures.

To be successful at anything, you need the right to fail, not just occasionally.

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

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.

When you try new things, you will make mistakes. That's OK.

It's OK to make mistakes... Try different things.