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I wonder how many times Chesley Sullenberger had to break a simulated plane in half before he could land a real one in the Hudson River.

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Not the point. Even if he never trained for that specific instance before, he was ready for failure.

When things went wrong, he didn't lose his cool or panic. He was ready for things to go wrong even if he wasn't expecting it.

By failing all of the time during training, he conditioned himself to not be upset about failure.

I was agreeing by offering a real example of frequent failure leading to success.

Actually he failed, we could say that he crashed the plane into the Hudson River. It's a matter of measure. If he ever do it again, he might do even better ;).

I think that we improve continuously from failure into something that looks more and more like success. Success is very relative to what you are able to accomplish at a time. If failing teach you something, might be it's a success ?

It's safer to think of success as a step in a potentially endless process. Microsoft (as an example) treated IE6 as an end, and it cost them substantial market share while they tried to catch up to the new entrant.

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