GoldenEye was forging its own path, a departure from the Rare games that had gone before. When you consider that this was the first project for eight of the nine team members, that was perhaps to be expected. They may have been inexperienced, but they were unfettered by expectations of what a game could and couldn’t be.

They turned naivety into ambition and the enforced isolation of this happy band – “Rare organised teams into separate barns and you only had keys to your particular cell block”, quips Dave – meant that the newbies on the team had to find their own way.

“Because it was most people’s first game”, explains [developer] Graeme Norgate, “we did things we might not do again because it was too much work. We didn’t take the easy route. If something sounded like a good idea, it was like, ‘Yeah let’s do it!’ The world was our oyster! Only afterwards would you find it was a world of pain.”

This isn’t the only story of video game creation where failure was the secret to success. Fans of this blog may remember that Angry Birds, the most popular game of all time, was preceded by over fifty failures. And that leading game design expert Jane McGonigal notes that gamers love to fail. Or, that much of the success of the video game industry is risky, almost crazy moves.

Every video game involves failure. You need those extra lives because you’re going to get killed along the way. You need to head down the wrong path in order to find the right one. And if you’re creating a video game, ignorance and naivety may be among your best assets. Making mistakes—in video games and elsewhere—is essential to the process of success.

City authorities in Zimbabwe’s second largest city said Saturday they were appealing to home owners to flush their toilets at a specified time as a way to unblock sewers after days of severe water rationing.

Bulawayo City Council has asked its more than 1 million residents to flush their toilets simultaneously at 7:30 p.m. when water supplies are restored. City officials say “synchronized flushing” is needed to clear waste that would have accumulated in sanitary facilities which will have been affected by days of water outages.

Zimbabwe has had many struggles in recent years. A synchronized toilet flush might seem relatively minor compared to hyperinflation, international sanctions, and general instability. The US State department warns that “The political, social, economic, and security situations in Zimbabwe are unpredictable and could deteriorate quickly without warning. Political harassment and intimidation by members of Zimbabwe’s security forces is pervasive and security forces may suppress dissent by whatever means deemed necessary.”

But, a synchronized flush may be exactly what the country’s sewage system needs. It also shows a willingness among individual to cooperate and to work together to improve infrastructure. We usually consider a trip to the bathroom to be something done in private. It’s either a normal biological function or a result of recent failures in diet or health.

For the residents of Harare, however, a combined bathroom trip is hoped to help move the city and the country one more step forward. It’s an admission that the government needs the people as much as the people need the government. It’s a sign, in it’s own curious way, that failure is the secret to success.

If you’re in the area, listen carefully around 7:30PM.

The full details of story comes from a letter to the editor in the February 1982 issue of the The American Statistician from Charles Stegman, which in turn quotes The People’s Almanac from 1978:

The first official survey of Everest took place in 1852. The surveyors took measurements in six places and derived an average figure of 29,000 ft. This seemed too much like a round number estimate for an official report, so they added 2 ft. to their published finding to make the height 29,002. An Indian team surveying in 1953 found the mountain to be 29,028 ft., 26 ft. higher than the 1852 “estimate.”

It’s easy to image the conversation among the team back in the 1850′s. These guys ran the average and came up with a nice round number of 29,000. They probably figured when they got back to civilization, people would accuse them of not actually doing any climbing and instead spending their time relaxing at the local bar.

What’s a couple of feet? That’s still 99.9931% accuracy. The interesting failure is not in the surveying, but in the intentional deception. The survey team thought that no one would believe a round figure, so they fudged the data.

Failure is the secret to success. If you want a claim to last for hundred years, you might need to spin the details ever so slightly. That’s not to say that scientists, engineers, surveyors or other professionals should make bold lies. Just that a little inaccuracy is sometimes, strangely enough, surprisingly beneficial.

Burger King [offered] a free Whopper if you unfriend 10 people on Facebook. Use the WHOPPER® Sacrifice application on Facebook to get started. Maybe you have 10 Facebook friends you don’t care about. Or join forces with other random Whopper lovers and use [aka, dump] each other just to get a coupon for a free Whopper.

Let’s all take a good look at what you’re getting in exchange for deleting people from your virtual life:

This promotion is long gone, but the comments on Serious Eats remain. One from a user named “Big B” details the brutality of this campaign:

FYI, unlike when you normally delete a friend on FB, if you do a Whopper sacrifice the victim *will* receive a notification… saying that they were sacrificed for a burger.

What does the Whopper Sacrifice marketing campaign have to do with failure? Just about everything. First: this is fairly negative as far as marketing goes. Burger King is saying (albeit somewhat jokingly) that their burgers are better than having friends. That’s just cruel.

Second, the BK team is taking advantage of self-created “negative” publicity. Being cocky is part of their brand, and apparently, it works.

Failure is the secret to success. Maybe the Whopper Sacrifice program didn’t last (perhaps because they gave away too many free flame-broiled burgers) but it shows a willingness to take risks. That’s the essence of creativity, in marketing and beyond.

Leo Fender neither drank nor smoked and had few close friends. He had no children. “His guitars and amps,” one associate said, “those were his kids.” He was described by more than one associate as something of a recluse. While he dabbled in photography, liked to play pinochle on a Saturday night, and owned an expensive boat, his only true hobby, perhaps his obsession, was his work. He was a man of few words. He did not play guitar.

It’s hard to imagine the life of someone who completely transformed music but did not contribute any of his own musical inspiration. We usually think of inventors as scratching an itch, as people who set out to solve their own problem or at least bring something into the world that they personally plan to use.

But not in this case. Although Fender died in 1991, a recent New York Times article reminisces about his influence and the company that survives.

IN 1948, a radio repairman named Leo Fender took a piece of ash, bolted on a length of maple and attached an electronic transducer.

You know the rest, even if you don’t know you know the rest.

You’ve heard it — in the guitar riffs of Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Knopfler, Kurt Cobain and on and on.

Failure is the secret to success. If you want to create the sound that changes the world, you don’t have to be the artist that goes on stage. You just might be the artist in the lab, tinkering until you build something that can only sing in someone else’s hands.

You don’t have to play. You just have to start.

He dropped out of high school in the 10th grade, and that he has an insatiable love of books and thirst for knowledge. If only more high school graduates had that last bit.

Rick first fell in love with books when he was eight years old, and began suffering horrific grand mal epileptic seizures. He feared for his life, and after he had one he’s been laid up in bed for about ten days. During that time, he feasted on books.

Long time readers of the Failure Book Blog may recognize this story. It sounds like what happened to another Hollywood legend. That man is Martin Scorsese, who suffered from asthma as a child.

Countless successes grow out of failure early in life. The concert violinist Itzhak Perlman contracted polio at the age of 4. President Bill Clinton grew up watching his mother be abused—and later passed the Violence Against Women Act.  Jack London, Louis Armstrong, H.G. Wells and many more dropped out of high school. Failure is the secret to success.

That’s not to say that you should quit school, leave a job or wish for a debilitating illness. But rather, that adversity is what makes success meaningful and possible. Don’t fear failure. Instead: embrace it.

In an opinion piece at TechCrunch, he writes:

I’ve started a bunch of companies. Sold some. Failed at most. I’ve invested in a bunch of startups. Sold some. Failed at some, and the jury is still sequestered on a few others. I can tell you overall, though, everything I have done has been distinguished by its mediocrity, its lack of a grand vision, and any success I’ve had can be just as much put in the luck basket as the effort basket.

Altucher has more to say on the topic of failure:

By definition, most of us are pretty mediocre. We can strive for greatness but we will never hit it. So it means we will often fail. Not ALWAYS fail. But often.

…

My last 16 out of 17 business attempts were failures. I made so many mistakes in my first successful business I’m almost embarassed to recount them.
…

The mediocre entrepreneur understands that persistence is not the self-help cliche “Keep going until you hit the finish line!”. The key slogan is, “Keep failing until you accidentally no longer fail.” That’s persistence.

What is the secret to success? According to this investor, it’s paying attention to where you don’t succeed. It’s finding time to do nothing, and recognizing that procrastination might be your mind telling you that you should be doing something else. The secret to success is failure.

The company never patented WD-40, in order to avoid having to disclose the ingredients publicly. Its name became synonymous with the product, like Kleenex.

[Former CEO] Mr. Barry acknowledged in interviews with Forbes magazine in 1980 and 1988 that other companies, including giants like 3M and DuPont, made products that closely resembled WD-40.

“What they don’t have,” he said, “is the name.”

Failure is the secret to success. By staying away from the US Patent and Trademark Office, WD-40 was able keep their focus on promoting and marketing their own product, rather than fighting off people trying to copy a public list of ingredients.

By the way, the name WD-40? It’s another tale of failure and success. The official history page on the company website explains:

It took them 40 attempts to get the water displacing formula worked out. But they must have been really good, because the original secret formula for WD-40®—which stands for Water Displacement perfected on the 40th try—is still in use today.

Failure is the secret to success. And in the case of WD-40, it wasn’t just failure to file a patent and failure to give up after thirty-nine tries—-it was failure of the employees of their customers follow procedure.

Convair, an aerospace contractor, first used WD-40 to protect the outer skin of the Atlas Missile from rust and corrosion. The product actually worked so well that several employees snuck some WD-40 cans out of the plant to use at home.

A little minor employee theft made all the difference for the WD-40 company!

German nursing homes started a trend that has taken hold of European nursing homes throughout the country: fake bus stops for Alzheimer’s patients.

The idea was first tried at Benrath Senior Center in Düsseldorf, Germany, who joined forces with a local care association and the public transportation department to construct an exact replica of a standard bus stop outside, with one small difference: buses do not use it.

…

The theory of why this type of deception works is that in Alzheimer’s patients their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.

On the one hand, this seems terrible. Alzheimer’s patients are already suffering with memory and awareness issues. An active campaign to lie to them feels like unethical. We want medical professionals to tell us the truth, right?

But instead, the article shows how this is a form of therapy.

How the system works is that the bus stop diffuses the sense of panic. For instance, if a delusional patient decided that she needed to go home immediately because her children were all alone and waiting for her, the attendant didn’t need to restrain her or talk her out of it, she simply said, “Oh, well, there’s the bus stop.” Thus, the patient would go sit and wait. Knowing that she was on her way home, she would relax and, given her diminished cognition, she would eventually forget why she was there. Staff can then approach the patients and tell them that the bus is delayed and invite them in for refreshments while they wait. Five minutes later they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave.

Failure is the secret to success. Sometimes the best way to help people is to do something which might at first glance might a little dishonest. Sometimes the best system for treating a disease is give people a momentary illusion to help them feel better. Sometimes we need a bit of sugar to help the medicine go down.

What’s the solution? Watch this amazing video [direct link].

Failure is the secret to success. Sometimes a piece of junk—like a leftover office supply—can be the perfect solution to an expensive dilemma. Don’t be afraid to try something which seems too cheap to possibly work.