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Module by: John Kearon. E-mail the author

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Name: The Paradox of Success
ID: m19137
Language: English (en-gb)
Summary: The paradox of success is you need to embrace failure to achieve it. This is a paper born out of a speech I gave to 600 17 year olds on entrepreneurship during the UK’s enterprise week in November 2007. It must rank as one of the most nerve jangling speeches I’ve ever done, since owning a teenager of my own I had strong clues that they can be a cynical and challenging audience. However, setting anxiety and cynicism aside, I really wanted to share something of what it takes to successfully invent an innovative new product and commercialise it. The reason for being invited to speak at these events is you’ve supposedly done something successful and the convention is to share this success as if it was the only possible outcome of your company’s brilliance. But something about this teenage audience, over half of whom said they wanted to start their own business, made me abandon convention and share the brutal, unvarnished truth that the essential, hard earned ingredient in successful creativity and entrepreneurship is…failure. Failure is the essential ingredient that nobody talks about or acknowledges and everyone tries desperately and understandably to avoid. But as any inventor, creative or entrepreneur knows, great ideas are not born perfect but are forged in the furnace of trial and error. As Darwin showed, this is the simple but brutal algorithm of life. This seemingly random but amazingly productive cycle of mutation and natural selection, trial and error, has produced the whole of the abundant diversity of life on earth. Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize winning physicist said about progress in any field, “Mistakes are at the heart of progress, so our challenge as scientists, is how to make more mistakes faster”. Or as I said to my teenage audience, “you’ve spent the last few years being told not to fail by teachers and parents and yet if you really want to create anything genuinely new; you’ve got to start learning how to fail”. Pablo Picasso, who knew a thing or two about originality, had another way of putting it when he said “There’s nothing worse than a great start” having long since learned to celebrate failures and difficulties as key to finding completely new avenues of creative expression.
Subject: Business
Keywords: Curiosity, Darwin, Experiment, Failure, Passion, Perseverence, Rigour, Success
Document Type: -//CNX//DTD CNXML 0.5 plus MathML//EN
License: Creative Commons Attribution License CC-BY 2.0
Authors: John Kearon (john.kearon@brainjuicer.com)
Copyright Holders: John Kearon (john.kearon@brainjuicer.com)
Maintainers: John Kearon (john.kearon@brainjuicer.com)
Latest version: 1.1 (history)
First publication date: Jan 3, 2009 3:04 am -0600
Last revision to module: Jan 3, 2009 3:19 am -0600

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Version History

Version: 1.1 Jan 3, 2009 3:19 am -0600 by John Kearon
Changes: 
Added the film of the paper

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American Chemical Society (ACS) Style Guide:

Kearon, J. The Paradox of Success, Connexions Web site. http://cnx.org/content/m19137/1.1/, Jan 3, 2009.

American Medical Assocation (AMA) Manual of Style:

Kearon J. The Paradox of Success [Connexions Web site]. January 3, 2009. Available at: http://cnx.org/content/m19137/1.1/.

American Psychological Assocation (APA) Publication Manual:

Kearon, J. (2009, January 3). The Paradox of Success. Retrieved from the Connexions Web site: http://cnx.org/content/m19137/1.1/

Chicago Manual of Style (Bibliography):

Kearon, John. "The Paradox of Success." Connexions. January 3, 2009. http://cnx.org/content/m19137/1.1/.

Chicago Manual of Style (Note):

John Kearon, "The Paradox of Success," Connexions, January 3, 2009, http://cnx.org/content/m19137/1.1/.

Chicago Manual of Style (Reference, in Author-Date style):

Kearon, J. 2009. The Paradox of Success. Connexions, January 3, 2009. http://cnx.org/content/m19137/1.1/.

Modern Languages Association (MLA) Style Manual:

Kearon, John. The Paradox of Success. Connexions. 3 Jan. 2009 <http://cnx.org/content/m19137/1.1/>.