Experiment with crazy ideas, fail & iterate--it's a prerequisite to your success. Don't fear trying an experiment where you don't know the outcome, relish the idea of discovery.

Fail early, fail often, fail forward.

Experiment with crazy ideas, fail & iterate--it's a prerequisite to your success. Don't fear trying an experiment where you don't know the outcome, relish the idea of discovery.

You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work .

You try again. You fail better.

The way I think about it, if you want to invent, if you want to do any innovation, anything new, you’re going to have failures because you need to experiment. I think the amount of useful invention you do is directly proportional to the number of experiments you can run per week per month per year. So if you’re going to increase the number of experiments, you’re also going to increase the number of failures.

The way I think about it, if you want to invent, if you want to do any innovation, anything new, you're going to have failures because you need to experiment. I think the amount of useful invention you do is directly proportional to the number of experiments you can run per week per month per year. So if you're going to increase the number of experiments, you're also going to increase the number of failures.

Try. Fail. Fail again. Fail better.

As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

try, fail, learn, try differently.

Treat failure like a scientist.

Each attempt is an experiment. Each mistake is a clue.

You're not failing. You're refining.

Oh, it’s everything. I think the ability to see connections where people don’t normally see connections is so important. When you’re able to think about problems from a bird’s-eye view rather than being stuck on the small, incremental aspects of it, you come up with solutions that people may think are crazy, but they end up being the best approaches. Of course you also fail a lot more, because you pursue crazy ideas. But in the process of failing, you find new directions that enhance your research.

It’s better to fail while striving for something wonderful, challenging, adventurous, and uncertain than to say, ‘I don’t want to try because I may not succeed completely.