Joshua Rodriguez’s Reviews > Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do > Status Update

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- Creativity is the art of fusing two ideas together. Dropbox came from fusing a USB stick, with the Internet.
- Creativity comes from problems. The idea of fusing a USB stick with the Internet came from the inventor forgetting to bring his USB stick with him.
- After the creative leap is made, the difference between success and failure is discipline. Work on every detail of your idea, and execution, until perfection

Testing thousands of small, well-defined presumptions is an incredibly effective way of producing a significant improvement in your chosen domain.

"It is possible to make significant progress against the biggest problem in the world through the accumulation of a set of small steps, each well thought out, carefully tested, and judiciously implemented." - Esther Duflo

The start of the book stresses the importance of accepting and learning from failure - which is cool, but this chapter focuses on the fact that failure is everywhere.

- Example: Beyond scared straight programme. Seems logical, but actually ineffective at preventing crime. Only way to find was a random control sample test, not ignoring missing responses.

- Improvement involves making mistakes, so expect them
- Making mistakes is not enough; to learn from mistakes you need to:
--> Be prepared to be wrong and embarrassed
--> Gather and analyse as much data about the mistake as possible
--> Condense the analysis into simple, actionable changes