THE LIFE OF AN ENTREPRENEUR IS NEVER easy, even in the best of times. And in moments of upheaval, moments of political games and culture wars and actual wars, it can feel impossible. How—when the rules of the game keep changing, along with the sentiments and needs of customers—can one turn an idea into a going concern?
In light of this question, I’ve found myself returning to a book I bought my son several years ago, titled Mistakes that Worked.
The book shares the origin stories of thirty-seven popular inventions that resulted not from ingenious planning and flawless execution but rather from blundering ahead, observing what happened, and adapting.
Potato chips, for instance, were the result of a temper tantrum thrown by a chef named George Crum. He’d grown enraged by a customer who kept sending his meal back to the kitchen, along with the request to fry the potatoes longer. Crum, out of spite, fried the potatoes until they curled and doused them in salt. He then personally delivered them to the table, spoiling for a fight. To his surprise, the customer thought they were delicious and asked for another order. Others loved them, too. And for the next fifty years, “Saratoga chips,” as they came to be called, were celebrated as a local delicacy. Today, potato chips are an estimated $30 billion global industry. If only all our petty acts could be so profitable.
Aspirin, penicillin, Ivory Soap, Velcro, and (an example closer to home) Coca-Cola all have similarly accidental origins, and are thus included in the book. Viagra, which was invented by chemists who noticed a strange side effect while failing to develop a blood-pressure medicine, is not included—as it would be supremely weird to mention it in a children’s book—but it is nonetheless another example of a billion-dollar mistake.
At first glance, it might be hard to see how such stories could bring comfort, especially to all those entrepreneurs out there earnestly striving. Many of them seek to create businesses with excellent customer service. What good does it do, then, in the face of all their effort, to present George Crum, who inadvertently launched a billion-dollar industry by attempting to perform the opposite of customer service?
Such stories are valuable because they expose the baffling gap between how we tell ourselves things happen and how they actually play out. The contrast reminds us that, just as no one can predict the future, no one really knows what they’re doing, that outcomes can’t be engineered, and that all those folks peddling “best practices” are really offering nothing more than the illusion of control.
But this isn’t an argument for a fatalistic, “why even try?” outlook. In fact, I intend the opposite: The one thing all the accidents in this book have in common is they occurred while people were trying to do something. It’s in that effort that one develops the skill that has shaped our country and our most enduring art forms: improvisation.
The purpose of Mistakes that Worked, as stated in its introduction, is to “to teach all of us…‘Intelligence is not to make no mistakes. But to quickly see how to make them good.’ ” I find it profound how much that mirrors Alexis de Tocqueville’s assessment of our country in the 1830s: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”
Recently, I’ve heard many people repeat the phrase “You don’t know what you don’t know,” and every time it makes me think of a founder who once told me, “If I’d been told everything that was going to happen when I started this company, I’m not sure I would’ve started this company.” And yet he’s glad he did, as are the people who earned paychecks from his company.
That founder has blundered, and blundered on, and ran from failure the way Indian Jones ran from that giant rolling rock. In that way, he’s an adventurer, and I admire him for it. I admire anyone who tries—because that’s when improvisation begins, and it’s how the best accidents happen.
