Carol S. Dweck Quotes

Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try something.

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.

We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee to fail intelligently... to experiment over and over again and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

Entrepreneurs … benefit greatly from being willing to fail, willing to experiment. Good entrepreneurs tend to be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details. They’re persistent on what they’re trying to accomplish, but they are willing to rewrite the details as needed as they learn and as things fail.

If the first plan which you adopt does not work successfully, replace it with a new plan; if this new plan fails to work, replace it in turn with still another, and so on, until you find a plan which does work. Right here is the point at which the majority of men meet with failure, because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

You win by trying. And failing. Test, try, fail, measure, evolve, repeat, persist.

If we screw it up, start over. Try something else.

When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working.

The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. The hard part is figuring out when to be which.

If failure is not an option, neither is success. Innovation is just repeated failure till you come up with something that works.

I like the challenge of trying different things and wondering whether it's going to work or whether I'm going to fall flat on my face.

Sometimes you can fail in an experiment. But if you fail, you still don't stop observing that thing, looking for a better way.

I think if I try to develop a formula, it ends up not working.

Every time you find something that doesn't work, you're a step closer to what does work.

Much can often be learned by the repetition under different conditions, even if the desired result is not obtained.

When a thing's done, it's done, and if it's not done right, do it differently next time.

For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.

The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

Almost nothing works the first time it's attempted. Just because what you're doing does not seem to be working, doesn't mean it won't work. It just means that it might not work the way you're doing it.

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.

You always want to try, in everything you do, to attempt something you've never tried before, and the only way to succeed at that is through failure, and the only way to succeed through failure is just banging your head against the wall over and over until you get to that interesting thing on the other side.

I have to try different things to see what works best. Other people get impatient with that.

I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.