Boyan Slat Quotes

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

For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.

We shouldn't be afraid to fail- if we are not failing we are not pushing. 80% of the stuff in the studio is not going to work. If something is not good enough, stop 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.

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.

The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

I've certainly had a number of failures along the way, depending on my own instincts and creativity, some fairly celebrated, at least during their time.

You can't have a hit every time. The main thing is to keep on working and not be afraid to take risks. It's better to do something that's not perfect and successful every time. It's important to be fearless and move forward, to learn from what went wrong.

I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.

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.

Iteration, not ideation, is the most important part of early stage entrepreneurship. You have to have a lot of ideas - a lot of bad ideas - if you want to end up with a good one.

We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That's why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.

Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right.

Don't let people tell you your ideas won't work. If you're passionate about an idea that's stuck in your head, find a way to build it so you can prove to yourself that it doesn't work.

In trying to make something new, half the undertaking lies in discovering whether it can be done. Once it has been established that it can, duplication is inevitable.

If you start your own thing, you can learn a lot really fast from doing things wrong.

Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try something.

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

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.

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.

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.