Remember the advice of our innovators: fail often!

[netmouse]

My dad has often told me that as an engineer, you only learn from your failures, not your successes. John W. Backus, the lead on the IBM research team that developed Fortran, said something similar:

“You need the willingness to fail all the time,” he said. “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.”

Backus is being mourned today. He died at the age of 82.