Monday, January 14, 2008

Best-Ever Entrepreneurship Quotes, week 67

Here's the 67th installment of our weekly series of motivational quotations, personally selected to get your week off to an inspired start.

“Humans have learned only through mistakes.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), architect, author, inventor and philosopher (and creator of the geodesic dome that housed the U.S. pavilion at Montreal’s Expo 67)

The prolific Mr. Fuller believed mistakes are useful and necessary. To avoid a sense of total mortification at their propensity for making mistakes, Fuller believed human beings were deliberately endowed with “pride, vanity and inventive memory” to help us forget our own errors.

As he wrote, “So effective has been the nonthinking, group deceit of humanity that it now says, 'Nobody should make mistakes,' and punishes people for making mistakes."

How about you: Do you encourage (and forgive) mistakes in your business?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

One of my favourite quotes is by Douglas Adams (author of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy).

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

That being said, listening and learning from others is what I try to do all the time.