>Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill --- > You may reasonably suspect that the poet worked his way to each new poem partly by the motive of disappointment with the last. > – Wendell Berry --- From: **The 5 Elements of Creative Thinking** The typical attitude that mistakes should be avoided is patently wrong and has several detrimental consequences. The mind-set that mistakes are poisonous often freezes us into inaction. If we have the healthier attitude that failure is a potent teacher and a scheduled stop along the road to success, then we find ourselves liberated to move forward sooner, because mistakes are actions we definitely can take at any time. If you're stuck, a mistake can be just the thing to unstick you. Any creative accomplishment evolves out of lessons learned from a long succession of missteps. Failure is a critical element of effective learning, teaching, and creative problem solving. Mistakes direct our attention in productive ways by forcing us to focus on the specific task of determining why the attempt at hand failed ... Viewing failure as an opportunity for learning requires a fresh mind-set. If you think, "I'm stuck and giving up. I know I can't get it right," then get it wrong. Once you make the mistake, you can ask, "Why is that wrong?" Now you're back on track, tackling the original challenge. .... The next time you face a daunting challenge, think to yourself, "In order for me to resolve this issue, I will have to fail nine times, but on the tenth attempt, I will be successful." This attitude frees you and allows you to think creatively without fear of failure, because you understand that learning from failure is a forward step toward success. Take a risk and when you fail, no longer think, "Oh, no, what a frustrating waste of time and effort," but instead extract a new insight from tht misstep and correctly think, "Great: one down, nine to go—I'm making forward progress!" And indeed you are. After your first failure, think, "Terrific, I'm 10% done!" Mistakes, loss, and failure are all flashing lights clearly pointing the way to deeper understanding and creative solutions. .... Once you're open to the positive potential of failure, failing productively involves two basic steps: creating the mistake and then exploiting the mistake. .... A specific mistake is an excellent source of insight and direction, because a mistake gives you something specific to think about: "This attempt is wrong because—." When you fill in the blank, you are forcing yourself to identify precisely what is wrong with your attempted solution. This process shifts the activity from trying to think of a correct solution, which you don't know at the moment, to the activity of correcting mistakes, which is often something you can do. .... The defects as well as the strengths of our first effort aren't available for us to examine until they exist. Making the errors overt makes the corrections overt as well. Moreover, drafts often contain unexpected strong features. Iteration allows us to see what's there and how we can improve—a little bit at a time. .... When Edison was asked how he felt about his countless attempts at making a lightbulb, he replies, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."