Claude Nicollier Quotes

The important thing to remember, if you are trying something that is an innovation, is not to think too much about it. Because if you take too long, by the time you get there, the world will have changed. You take a risk, and if it doesn't work, you make a change. We are not betting our lives on it.

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.

I think half the time I just assume I don't really know what I'm doing - you have to do that to a certain extent, but you don't have to think you're an idiot savant.

Everything is an experiment.

Nobody knows what they're doing, so don't be afraid to try things.

No one knows what's a good idea or a bad idea until you try it.

I have no idea what I am doing but incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.

Never say never Never is a long, undependable time, and life is too full of rich possibilities to have restrictions placed upon it.

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 know you're gonna have failures, there's no way to avoid it. Especially if you're an entrepreneur, if you're doing something new, of course there are gonna be mistakes. How can you not make mistakes? You don't know what you're going; it's unchartered territory.

In such doubtful matters, where you have to work as a pioneer, you must be able to put some trust in your intuition and follow your feeling even at the risk of going wrong.

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.

Just build things and find out if they work.

Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

The metaphor that I frequently use for entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane plane on the way down.

Optimism is important. You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set. There is a phrase I learned in college called, 'having a healthy disregard for the impossible.' That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not do.

Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.

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.

Starting a business is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. In mid air, the entrepreneur begins building a parachute and hopes it opens before hitting the ground.

Writing is like building a bridge while you're on it. If you step forward you fall off and there's nothing in front of you.

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place. Trust your demon.