Glorious Mistakes as Engines of Creative Growth
Go and make interesting mistakes, make glorious and amazing mistakes. — Neil Gaiman
An Invitation to Daring Experiments
Neil Gaiman’s line, popularized in his Make Good Art address (University of the Arts, 2012), reframes failure as a compass rather than a verdict. To make “interesting” and “glorious” mistakes is to pursue questions whose answers are not yet scripted, where discovery outweighs decorum. This is not a plea for carelessness; it is a call to craft experiments that might fail for meaningful reasons. Such failure leaves footprints—evidence about what to try next. By choosing curiosity over caution, we trade the comfort of prediction for the possibility of originality.
How Science Advances by Being Wrong
Moving from art to inquiry, science institutionalizes error as progress. Karl Popper’s falsifiability (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934) argues that knowledge grows when bold hypotheses survive attempts to refute them. Negative results, though less glamorous, prune dead ends so better ideas can flourish. Inventors model this ethic: James Dyson recounts building 5,000+ prototypes before a working cyclone vacuum (Against the Odds, 1997), not as a badge of stubbornness but as structured learning. In this light, a failed test is a successful question.
Creative Fields Turn Errors into Style
Likewise, the arts transmute mistakes into material. Jazz improviser Herbie Hancock often recounts playing a “wrong” chord that Miles Davis immediately reframed, transforming error into motif (Hancock’s 2011 TED talk). Pixar institutionalizes this alchemy with its Braintrust, where early, flawed cuts receive candid notes so the film can be rebuilt from strong bones (Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc., 2014). Drafts, rehearsals, and rough cuts aren’t detours; they’re the main road by which a work discovers itself.
The Psychology of Learning from Errors
Psychology explains why Gaiman’s injunction works. Carol Dweck’s growth mindset research shows that treating mistakes as information drives persistence and mastery (Mindset, 2006). Robert Bjork’s “desirable difficulties” suggest that challenges and retrieval struggles deepen encoding and retention (1994). In cognitive terms, prediction errors—gaps between expectation and outcome—are precisely the signals the brain uses to update models of the world. Therefore, an errorless path can feel smooth yet teach little; the slightly-too-hard path teaches a lot.
Designing Safe Spaces to Fail Well
To turn mistakes into momentum, we must engineer conditions where missteps carry insight, not ruin. Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows that teams learn more when members can speak up without fear (Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999), a finding echoed by Google’s Project Aristotle (2016). Practices like rapid prototyping, A/B testing, blameless postmortems, and time-boxed design sprints shrink risk while amplifying learning. In such sandboxes, errors are reversible, documented, and immediately repurposed into the next iteration.
Boundaries: Glorious, Not Reckless
Yet not all mistakes are created equal. Jeff Bezos distinguishes one-way doors (irreversible, high-stakes) from two-way doors (reversible, low-stakes), urging speed on the latter and prudence on the former (Amazon shareholder letter, 2016). In safety-critical domains—medicine, aviation, finance—experimentation belongs in simulations, checklists, and controlled trials, not on live systems. A practical rule emerges: maximize learning per unit of potential harm, and stage your risks so that even when you’re wrong, you’re right about what to try next.
A Playbook for Interesting Mistakes
Finally, make the habit concrete. State a hypothesis before acting so failure is diagnostic, not demoralizing. Ship small, frequent versions. Keep a “failure résumé” to track patterns and progress (see Johannes Haushofer’s CV of Failures, 2016). Run premortems to imagine how a plan failed and fix it in advance (Gary Klein, HBR, 2007). Most of all, close the loop—extract a lesson within 24 hours of any miss. In doing so, you honor Gaiman’s challenge: not merely to err, but to err into excellence.