Clayton Christensen Quotes

It takes 10 million failures to find the right stuff.

You don't have to get it right the first time.

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.

Every time you find something that doesn't work, you're a step closer to what does work.

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.

Is the button white or orange or green or yellow? Does it say 'sell', or 'sell now', or 'on sale' or 'for sale'? You test, you test, you test and most of the ideas you try fail and so I would argue I failed my way to success.

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

Doing startups is all about making mistakes.

Almost nothing works the first time it's attempted. Just because what you're doing does not seem to be working, doesn't mean it won't work. It just means that it might not work the way you're doing it.

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.

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 most successful people in American life are those that have had horrific failures and have come back, done it again and again until they got it right, whether it's Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.

Many of the projects that we do that appear quite successful, it's actually often the second or third time we've given it a try.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

Founders: there is no shame in failing, take pride in that you have the guts to try something new.

If failure is not an option, neither is success. Innovation is just repeated failure till you come up with something that works.

If you are not successful, that means you're not making enough mistakes.

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.

You can't be afraid to fail. It's the only way you succeed - you're not gonna succeed all the time, and I know that.

Failure's inevitable. It happens all the time in a complex economy. And how did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us, computers and cell phones and so on? Well, the process was trial and error. There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered, and the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

After I graduated from Brandeis, I took all the money I had in the world, which was $5,000, and I made a short film. I made every mistake you could possibly make. It was a total disaster as a piece of work, and yet, you know, it was ambitious in some way.

Unless you're willing to have a go, fail miserably, and have another go, success won't happen.

Much can often be learned by the repetition under different conditions, even if the desired result is not obtained.

Failure is essential. Trial and error is necessary.