If you’re not having a fair degree of failures, you’re not exposing yourself to the upside of getting it dramatically right on dark horses. If you don’t like going home at night with a feeling of uncertainty, then you’re not cut out for it. If you try too hard to improve your failure rate, you become afraid of your inbox, terrified by the proposals made by authors and their agents. You end up having either no output or a book that is so bland that no one will want to read it. Discovering J.K. Rowling has reminded me of the sheer fun of knowing long before anyone else that you have something that will change the world.
– Nigel Newton, CEO of Bloomsbury, the publishing company who “discovered” Harry Potter
This underlines the importance of getting it wrong once in a while, and the utter stupidity of the old “Get it right the first time” maxim. From an article in Fast Company.
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