Bob Iger Quotes

Every new invention is like a baby. You think it may cure cancer or become the president, but in the end, you're happy it just stays out of jail.

Everybody wants to make something they think is a surefire winner, though nobody knows what a surefire winner is, in my opinion.

I like the challenge of trying different things and wondering whether it's going to work or whether I'm going to fall flat on my face.

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.

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.

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.

It might be a huge hit, it might not; but you learn something doing it.

There is an element of luck, there is an element of trial and error, sometimes you fail, sometimes you succeed. It's not as beautifully simple as it may seem when we are talking about it.

I believe that the constant possibility of failure or possibility of decision-making feeds your creativity.

When you're taking chances, you know it's not going to please everybody.

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.

Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.

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.

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you're not prepared to be original.

I tell the actors that the biggest gift they can give me is to fail. And that the second gift they can give me is to surprise me.

To me the greatest moment in an experiment is always just before I learn whether the particular idea is a good or a bad one. Thus even a failure is exciting, and most of my ideas have of course been wrong.

Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.

Be innovative. Don't listen to the tried and tested wisdom. Take a risk!

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.

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

Sometimes it takes a long time for a picture to incubate. And every time I do that, the rewards are so much bigger than what I would have gotten if I had only done the same as I always do. So each time I make an effort and I get out of a lazy routine, it's amazing how big the reward can be. It's listening to those little ideas knocking on the door in your mind.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

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

When you prohibit failure, you kill innovation.