Ed Lee Quotes

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 am somebody who... - I'm not saying I'm perfect, but I need that freedom, that ability to make mistakes out there. Because there's a fine line between making a mistake or being brilliant.

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.

To create an organization that's adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedent, to 'waste' time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their passions.

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.

You come for the money, you don't come to Barefoot College. You come for the work and the challenge, you'll come to the Barefoot College. That is where we want you to try crazy ideas. Whatever idea you have, come and try it. It doesn't matter if you fail. Battered, bruised, you start again.

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

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

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

The culture of Booking.com has been very good for me because it's a culture where you're allowed to fail. When you think about taking risks, if it's OK to fail, you actually do a lot more. And you learn a lot quicker.

Being wrong doesn't mean being creative - but if you aren't afraid of being wrong, you can't be creative.

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.

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.

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

I think when you've had success, publishers and reviewers and readers are willing to let you try something new if you've already proven yourself. They're excited about what you're doing, you have people interested in it, and actually waiting for it. It's empowering.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

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.

It's important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become memorable.

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.

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

BuzzFeed started as a lab with a small team where we would play with ideas.

I can't say I'm not grateful to have journalists writing about me as a genius. But I know it's not true. I'm not confused. I understand that success comes through a lot of failure and a lot of very embarrassing failure. People want to create the next Facebook, but they are too afraid to create the next Facemash.