I went to [the talent agency] William Morris and said, “Give me the craziest, most unproducable script you can find.” And they said, “Well…” And I said, “No, come on, give me something that is just the most bizarre thing you’ve ever read, and I want to read that.” And they went, “Oh, well, there’s Charlie Kaufman, but he’s great. I could give you that.” I read it and I said, “All right, I want to do this. Track this. If anyone else does this, and I’m not the first in the door, I’m leaving you guys.” And they delivered. They tracked it. So yes, if a piece of material jumps out at me like that… I mean, he was this obviously huge talent.

That script, by the way, was Being John Malkovich.

Failure is the secret to success. If you want to create something that’s never been done before, you have to be willing to try things which are absolutely crazy. Actor, director and producer John Cusack knew that an ordinary comedy wouldn’t make the cut. So he asked for something which the agency thought could never be done.

Just about everything truly interesting starts out seeming impossible. If it’s crazy, it just might work.

Friday, September 17: Ferruccio Lamborghini, founder of Automobili Lamborghini in 1963, made tractors until he went to Enzo Ferrari to have a little moan about a Ferrari he purchased. Lamborghini felt snubbed by Ferrari and in a defiant stance decided to start producing high-end sports cars himself. Already a rich man due to his businesses, Ferruccio set up the best facilities to facilitate his idea and the end result as they say, is history.

Let’s review: Ferruccio buys a fancy sports car from Enzo, but he has a problem. When he heads in for service, Enzo treats him poorly. Therefore, Ferruccio decides to launch his own line of sports cars. The rest is history.

Failure is the secret to success. Sometimes the greatest invention in history starts out of anger. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself driven to succeed from a place of frustration. And if a customer arrives with a complaint, never send them away. They might just become your biggest competitor.

As Lorraine notes, “Past failure is no indicator of future performance. The reason is that we learn from our mistakes, we learn from our failures.”

Check the out the video!

A single mutation in 1810 to 1820 in a Selecta orange tree planted at a monastery near Bahia in Brazil, probably yielded the navel orange, also known as the Washington, Riverside, or Bahia navel…The mutation causes the orange to develop a second orange at the base of the original fruit, opposite the stem, as a conjoined twin in a set of smaller segments embedded within the peel of the larger orange. From the outside, it looks similar to the human navel, hence its name.

Because the mutation left the fruit seedless, and therefore sterile, the only means available to cultivate more of this new variety is to graft cuttings onto other varieties of citrus tree. It was introduced into Australia in 1824 and Florida in 1835. Twelve such cuttings of the original tree were transplanted to Riverside, California in 1870, which eventually led to worldwide popularity.

Today, navel oranges continue to be produced through cutting and grafting. This does not allow for the usual selective breeding methodologies, and so not only do the navel oranges of today have exactly the same genetic makeup as the original tree, and are therefore clones, all navel oranges can be considered to be the fruit of that single nearly two-hundred-year-old tree.

Let’s review: Two hundred years ago an orange grew on a tree and by accident it grew into a seedless double orange. Ever since then, through cutting and grafting, it’s become one of the world’s most popular fruits.

But the poor navel orange has no way to reproduce. And therefore it can’t be improved through selective breeding. Failure is the secret to success. Had that monk tossed it aside, we’d have no navel oranges today.

If your business, your projects, or your personal life seem mutated beyond recognition, don’t panic. You might be like the navel orange. Failure could be the foundation of your future. It could be the sweet nectar of your success.

“An english journalist from Melody Maker (a weekly UK music mag), who reviewed this record, said it was “a bunch of daft punk”. So they decided to do some other music and Thomas and Guy-Manuel took this name (Daft Punk) as the name of their new group.

Today, Daft Punk is a hugely important band in the electronic music genre. In addition to the two Grammy Awards they won in 2009, they’ve been nominated for six more. But even if you’re not a fan of their work, it’s not difficult to appreciate the humor in the choice of their name. What many would have considered as an insult became the foundation for their future.

Failure is the secret to success. If a music journalist writes a bad review, why not take a few words from the story and reinvent yourself? Explore the possibility that what others think is wrong might just be right for you.

“We found a positive correlation,” says [researcher] Gino. “The more creativity required on the job, the more unethical behavior was self-reported.” Note: Subsequent studies seem to indicate that these findings weren’t simply a result of more honest reporting on the part of creative employees.

This isn’t to say that graphic designers are necessarily more dishonest than, say, accountants. Creative types are simply “at a higher risk for behaving unethically because they can more easily find reasons why their behavior is not problematic,” says Gino. In other words, original thinkers aren’t more ethically depraved than the rest of us; they’re just better equipped to find ways of being dishonest without compromising their own self-regard.

This might want to make you run out and lock the supply cabinet so that your artistic staff don’t rob you blind. But that shouldn’t be the message at all. The study doesn’t say anything at about self-control. Rather, it just says that creative people find ways to cheat that less creative folks don’t ever dream of.

The profound insight comes when you put these findings in reverse. If creative people are more dishonest because they can brainstrom a wider range of unsavory methodologies, perhaps you can become more creative by fantasizing about a life of crime. Isn’t this exactly what the world’s foremost law enforcement, military and security experts do every day? They have to dream up ways to break the system so they can defend against them.

Failure is the secret to success. If you want to expand your mind, think of ways to cheat. If you want to stop the flow of criminal activity, think like a criminal. Expect that you’ll have to at least entertain negative thoughts to find positive solutions. Doing something bad is often the only way to ensure that you can do something good.

If you haven’t failed lately, that’s unfortunate. Because accompanying every failing experience is an opportunity to learn…and to grow. It’s by failing that you learn to ultimately achieve greater levels of success. People who never fail are, for the most part, people who never take chances. Rather than set lofty goals that require them to stretch beyond their comfort zones, they set safe goals—ones they are assured of reaching.

The author of this piece is absolutely correct. Failure is the secret to success. The only way to know victory is to also know defeat. But, you have to risk failing.

Are you willing to take the chance that you might not have the outcome you want? Here’s a secret: you may not think you are in sales role, but if part of your job is to convince anyone of anything or build anything that hasn’t been done before, you are. Your role is to take risks and see what happens.

Failure is the secret to success. Decide to do what you must: fail in order to succeed.

If you’re toiling away at a low-paying job with a dwindling bank account hoping for your big break, here’s a bit of inspiration: Charles Forman, founder of iPhone game maker OMGPOP, was living paycheck to paycheck last week, and now he’s a multimillionaire.

…

“I had $1,700 in my bank account yesterday, and now I have a whole lot more,” he said.

OMGPOP sold for $180 million last Wednesday with a reported additonal $30 million earnout. Forman wouldn’t reveal how much of the sale went into his own pocket, but he said it was “way more” than $22 million.

Complex, by the way, quoted a New York Times story—which is even more amazing.

Omgpop had been limping along until Draw Something, a smartphone game it introduced just seven weeks ago, became a breakout hit. That drew the attention of Zynga, the maker of FarmVille and the current king of social games, which last week bought Omgpop for $180 million.

Draw Something transformed Omgpop from a little-known, nearly broke start-up into a must-have for an industry giant.

But it doesn’t end there. More from that same piece:

Omgpop did not start as a game company. Six years ago, Mr. Forman, a workout enthusiast whose Facebook page features a close-up of his abdominal muscles, founded what was then called I’m in Like With You, a dating site where users could essentially put themselves up for auction.

“The entire company started as a joke, honestly,” Mr. Forman said. He saw the site as a form of entertainment, he said, and only later realized that people were spending a lot of time on it. To capitalize on that audience, he converted it into a game site and renamed it Omgpop. “It’s one for the record books,” he said of the success of the company. “It is something I did not expect.”

Failure is the secret to success. You’re going to screw up. You’re going to struggle. You’re going to experience life as an unknown. You’re going to have to scrape together money to live, and you’ll never know what’s coming next.

But if the nature of your business is that you could strike it big, that failure is an important part of the process.

Failure keeps happening. It’s essential. Embrace it.

Incredibly, the British government printed 3.5 million of these posters but never used them. If one had not been accidentally discovered and posted in an obscure bookshop in the north of England, it would never have been noticed. The “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster would not have become worldwide phenomenon.

Failure is the secret to success. Just because something brilliant is hidden away in a drawer, never used, does not mean it is not brilliant. Just because you’ve printed up countless flyers for a message you never actually sent, does not mean you don’t have something to say.

Five words can change the world. “Keep calm and carry on.” So can six words: Failure is the secret to success.

After winning a game development competition sponsored by Nokia and HP, Niklas Hed founded a mobile game development studio in 2004 in Finland. We had developed 51 titles, before Rovio hit gold with Angry Birds.

Let’s read that again:

“We had developed 51 titles before we hit gold with Angry Birds.”

Failure is the secret to success. In order to create a worldwide phenomenon, you have to be ready to create perhaps fifty one other games that aren’t a stunning success.

First works are usually terrible. The photographer Henri Carter-Bresson, possibly the most famous artist in his medium of the 20th century, liked to tell people that the first 10,000 photos you take will be awful. At least the folks at Rovio got the number down to fifty-one.

How many times are you willing to fail in order to succeed?