These stories all share a number — an embarrassingly large count of attempts that didn't work. Nobody remembers the number with shame now. The failures weren't the opposite of the success; they were the tuition.
Over roughly fifteen years, Dyson built 5,126 vacuum prototypes that failed. The 5,127th worked.
Then the manufacturers rejected him anyway, so he founded his own company and became one of the most successful inventors of his generation.
The prototype that works is built from everything the failures taught.
The name on the blue-and-yellow can is a scoreboard: "Water Displacement, 40th formula." The chemists' first thirty-nine attempts failed.
They named the product after the one that worked — permanently commemorating how many tries it took.
Name your attempt, not your defeat.
Edison's team tested enormous numbers of materials hunting for a workable light bulb filament.
He famously refused to call the unsuccessful attempts failures — they were findings: thousands of ways that didn't work, each narrowing the road to the one that did.
A failed attempt is a fact you didn't have yesterday.
Early on, Disney was let go from a Kansas City newspaper job, and his first animation studio went bankrupt.
He arrived in Hollywood nearly broke — and built the most influential animation company in history.
Bankruptcy of a venture is not bankruptcy of a vision.
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