Home > Work > Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
1 " Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle. "
― Tim Harford , Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
2 " No plan survives first contact with the enemy. What matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt. "
3 " Pluralism matters because life is not worth living without new experiences - new people, new places, new challenges. But discipline matters too; we cannot simply treat life as a psychedelic trip through a series of novel sensations. "
4 " The Most successful industry of the last forty years has been built on failure after failure after failure. "
5 " The evolutionary algorithm--of variation and selection, repeated--searches for solutions in a world where the problems keep changing, trying all sorts of variants and doing more of what works. "
6 " And the fundamental point of all these massively parallel experiments is the same: when a problem reaches a certain level of complexity, formal theory won’t get you nearly as far as an incredibly rapid, systematic process of trial and error. "
7 " Given the likely shape of these ever-shifting landscapes, the evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wold gambles is the best possible way to search for solutions. "
8 " Few human inventions are more complex and tightly coupled than the banking system; Charles "
9 " In Iraq, the Army discovered that if the official hierarchy was on a disastrous course, it was vital to bypass it in order to adapt. Petraeus "
10 " Palchinsky principles’: first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along. The "
11 " Here’s the thing about failure in innovation: it’s a price worth paying. We "
12 " It may be satisfying to castigate the likes of Geithner and the heads of Lehman Brothers and AIG, but safety experts like Perrow know it is far more productive to design better systems than to hope for better people. "
13 " Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition,’ he "
14 " The complexity of the society we have created for ourselves envelops us so completely that, instead of being dizzied, we take it for granted. "
15 " whatever some Prius fans may believe, it turns out that Priuses do have a corporeal form, and a Prius in congested traffic will cause more emissions indirectly by slowing other cars down than it will emit directly. "
16 " That is why ‘learn from your mistakes’ is wise advice that is painfully hard to take. "
17 " Doing foolish things in an attempt ‘to correct the past’, like marrying the man whose baby you just aborted, isn’t unusual at all. It’s part of being human. What "
18 " the scale of the trouble, the economist John Kay was pointing out the similarities between the crunch "
19 " Although the rig’s crew had, in principle, shut down the flow of oil and gas to the platform, so much "
20 " did start paying attention to the unglamorous insights "
