Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

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

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

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.

I have a theory that the only original things we ever do are mistakes.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

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.

Punishing honest mistakes stifles creativity. I want people moving and shaking the earth and they're going to make mistakes.

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

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.

In order to be creative you have to be allowed to fail.

An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.

To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn't work out, you had your head cut off.

If something works, you shouldn't do it again. We want to do something that is new, original - something where there's a good chance of failure.

With innovation, there is always risk.

In addition to encouraging failure, I would also encourage companies to broadly create a culture of innovation. That should mean more than just technology and invention; it should mean something millennials know well: Ingenuity.

I have made some mistakes. No, a lot of mistakes. If you want to develop a new thing, a lot of mistakes will be inevitable. We should be allowed to make mistakes.

I think if you're going to be a little bit innovative or risk-taking, sometimes you're going to be wrong, and it's going to look bad. I understand that.

IF you are not making mistakes, then you are not doing anything.

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.

Embrace error: Create an atmosphere in which prudent risk taking is strongly encouraged.

You get the idea. Every business, like a painting, operates according to its own rules. There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once. There are no rules. You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it's because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over. It's the greatest thrill in the world and it runs away screaming at the first sight of bullet points.

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

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

Always make new mistakes.