Stepping Outside of the Box and Failure

Change and exploration is often about failure.   Embracing failure is common in fields such as science, business, and sports.  Successful people are the persistent ones who are not discouraged by short term failure.

There is an episode of This American Life where they look at a mathematician who took "three years of Sundays" to disprove a previously accepted assumption.  The host Ira Glass and science writer Paul Hoffman discuss this mathematician, Frank Nelson Cole.

Paul Hoffman That's what science is about. It's real people banging their heads against walls and years of false starts. That's the other thing. We don't talk about the researcher who spent two years trying to find what this gene did and then gave up, or spent three years trying to find a planet outside the solar system and gave up, and someone else eventually did. It's more a combination of insight and hard work, because-- 

Ira Glass Failure. 

Paul Hoffman And failure. Because people who think outside the box and achieve things outside the box often entertain a lot of wacky ideas that don't turn out to be true in the science world.

Science and math are fields where progress is incremental, with many failures along the way.   An important approach is to never, never give up.