Alan Arkin Quotes

I think if you're going to be a little bit innovative or risk-taking, sometimes you're going to be wrong, and it's going to look bad. I understand that.

One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you're allowed to fail.

Failure's inevitable. It happens all the time in a complex economy. And how did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us, computers and cell phones and so on? Well, the process was trial and error. There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered, and the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something, and it doesn't work, and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet... Ultimately, you become commercially successful.

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.

It takes 10 million failures to find the right stuff.

I love mistakes because it's the only way you learn.

I have found that I always learn more from my mistakes than from my successes. If you aren't making some mistakes, you aren't taking enough chances.

Is the button white or orange or green or yellow? Does it say 'sell', or 'sell now', or 'on sale' or 'for sale'? You test, you test, you test and most of the ideas you try fail and so I would argue I failed my way to success.

You don't learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don't really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time.

To be successful at anything, you need the right to fail, not just occasionally.

If you're cooking and not making mistakes, you're not playing outside your safety zone. I don't expect it all to be good. I have fat dogs because I scrap that stuff out the back door.

Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.

That's the way it is with entrepreneurial people. You try one thing, it doesn't work, you try another.

I somewhat joke that I know an awful lot because I learn from my mistakes. I just make a lot of mistakes. It's OK to fail in science just as long as you have the successes to go with the failures.

You want to hire great people and give them the opportunity to fail. You need to let them figure things out as they go along. If they fail repeatedly, then you probably have to find a different person, but if you don't let people have that opportunity to fail, they don't get to learn and grow and try things.

Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.

Doing startups is all about making mistakes.

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.

Your first projects aren't the greatest things in the world, and they may have no money value, they may go nowhere, but that is how you learn - you put so much effort into making something right if it is for yourself.

The way to succeed is to double your error rate.

We learn from failure, not from success!

In medicine, or in science, you go down a path and it turns out to be a dead end, you really made a contribution, because we know we don’t have to go down that path again. In the press, they call it failure. And so people are unwilling to innovate, unwilling to take risks in government …

A pioneering culture, one that actually enjoys and is excited by experimentation, a culture that rewards experimentation even as it embraces the fact that it is going to lead to failure… And a long-term orientation is a key part of that. If everything has to work this quarter, then you’re by definition not going to be doing very much experimentation.

I've certainly had a number of failures along the way, depending on my own instincts and creativity, some fairly celebrated, at least during their time.