Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.” Thomas Edison

1. Where are you getting negative results?
2. Do you see them as opportunities to gain rich insights? What are you learning?
3. How will you incorporate these learnings into your next attempt?

“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.”  Winston Churchill

1. What is your destination? Can you articulate it clearly?
2. What “dogs” are you stopping for that are distracting you from “getting there?”
3. What can you do today to move on and start ignoring them?

An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he’s in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that 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.”

— Charles Kettering  (head of R&D at GM from 1920-1947)