Your Daily Insight as told by Charles Kettering

We fully acknoweldge the anachronistic "his" and "he" and "him"-ness of this quote, but let's pretend that Mr. Kettering was applying this to both sexes (because we most certainly are):

An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four years examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. If he succeeds once then he's in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.