Chris Fairhurst

“Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything.

We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel—as we’ll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Creativity is, in many respects, a response.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Well, it doesn’t work. Lowering standards just leads to poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work and lavish praise.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

“Learning from failure has the status of a cliché. But it turns out that, for reasons both prosaic and profound, a failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do