Mistakes Can Be Good

If I had it to do over again, I'd talk a lot more about failure being acceptable and less about succeeding. There are 7 great examples here of why failure is actually very useful and why we should embrace it and move on with the freshly gained knowledge we're acquired.

Photosynthesis
1 of 7
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-johnson/steven-johnson-6-mistakes_b_770185.html#s161830

In the mid 1770s, the British chemist and radical Joseph Priestley decided to investigate how long it would take a plant to die if it was deprived of ordinary air. He placed a mint plant in a sealed bell jar, expecting that the plant would die, just as mice or spiders perished in the same circumstances. But he was wrong: the plant thrived. In fact, it thrived even if you burned all the oxygen out of the jar before placing the plant in it. Priestley’s error energized him to investigate this strange behavior, and it ultimately led him to one of the founding discoveries of what we now call ecosystem science: the realization that plants expel oxygen as part of photosynthesis, and indeed have created much of the earth’s breathable atmosphere.

"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.” - Plato