Let’s be honest about something right up front. Most of us could not try something 10,000 times.
Ten, maybe. Twelve if there’s coffee. Somewhere around attempt fourteen, a lot of us are on the couch narrating our own downfall to the dog. And the dog is not taking notes.
So when the famous Thomas Edison quote comes around, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work,” plenty of us nod along while quietly thinking, “Good for you, Tom. Apparently that’s your superpower, because the rest of us did not get one.”
Here’s the good news. The story is a little wrong, and the real one may actually be better.
Because it turns out Edison’s story wasn’t really about having some extraordinary supply of willpower, which is a relief for those of us who seem to run low somewhere around Thursday.
The part of the Edison story nobody tells
Historians at Rutgers have been sorting through Edison’s papers since 1978, and here’s what they’ll tell you: nobody kept count. Not even Edison.
The famous line comes from a battery project years after the lightbulb. What Edison actually said to a friend who felt sorry for him was closer to:
“Results! Why, man, I’ve gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.”
Results.
Not attempts. Not failures. Results.
And the lightbulb? By his own account, Edison tested “no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths” while searching for a filament that would last.
Carbonized cotton thread burned for about 14 hours. Bamboo from a shrine grove in Japan burned for roughly 1,200.
But here’s the part that feels especially useful to us: every burnout became information.
The Edison archive contains about five million pages and more than three thousand laboratory notebooks. He and his team documented what they tried, what happened, and what they might try next.
Maybe Edison didn’t need a superhuman tolerance for failure. Maybe he needed a really good filing system for feedback. And that is something the rest of us can borrow.
Failure is a verdict. Feedback is a note.
There’s a difference between the two, and it’s more than wordplay.
Failure can feel like a verdict. A door closes and a voice says, Well, I guess that tells us something about who you are.
Feedback gives us information. Something didn’t work, so we get curious about why and what we might try next.
Same event. Very different folder.
Most of us probably know the 2 a.m. version, when the brain suddenly decides it is fully qualified to review our entire life based on one conversation that went badly. That’s the verdict voice.
It tends to be loud. It tends to be certain. And in the long and storied history of 2 a.m., it has rarely handed any of us a particularly useful next step.
Here’s something we’ve noticed in this community, and honestly, in ourselves too. Sometimes calling something a failure is easier than reading the feedback.
Because reading the feedback means there may be a next step. And a next step could mean trying again, changing something, having another conversation, or doing a little more work.
Calling the whole thing a failure can be oddly restful too. Because when that happens, we get to put the whole thing down, take a rest and then move on.
That one may be worth reading twice. Some of us tried to scoot right past it.
Everyday “failures” that might just be feedback
Let’s put a few familiar experiences through the Feedback filing system.
- The job we applied for and never heard back about.
Silence can feel like a verdict, but there may be a hundred explanations we’ll never know. Wrong timing. Wrong fit. An internal candidate. A hiring manager with 400 résumés and a head cold. We can look at what’s ours to improve without turning somebody else’s decision into a character assessment. - The budget that blew up in month two.
A month gives us 30 days of information. If we only look at the final number, we may be skipping the useful part. What worked in week one? What quietly went sideways in week three? What surprised us? And which pieces are actually ours to change next month? - The 5:30 a.m. workout plan that lasted four days.
Maybe we’re not 5:30 people. Maybe the plan was too ambitious. Maybe the sneakers needed to be by the door. Those are things we can work with. “I have no discipline” doesn’t give us much to work with, and it probably doesn’t tell the whole story anyway. - The conversation that went sideways.
Maybe it was with a teenager, a partner, a parent, or a friend who’s been struggling. We may have learned something about what tone landed, what didn’t, or what conversation needs to happen next. Painful? Possibly. Useless? Probably not. - The meditation streak that broke on day three.
The meditation app may be deeply disappointed in us, but we can survive that. Those three days still gave us information. If meditation helped, maybe we simply start again Thursday. - The check-in that didn’t land.
We texted the friend who’s having a hard time and got “I’m fine” back. People go quiet for a hundred reasons. Maybe there’s something we could adjust, and maybe there isn’t. We can ask ourselves whether we gave them an easy question to answer or a big one they didn’t have words for yet. Either way, there may be something useful to learn without jumping to the conclusion, I made everything worse. - The email sent to the wrong person.
Okay, that one might just be a failure. Go apologize. Kidding. Mostly.
It’s also useful feedback that perhaps all of us could slow down for three seconds before hitting Send.
Why our brains sometimes file it wrong
There’s actually research around this, and we find it weirdly comforting.
Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach at the University of Chicago ran a series of studies in which people answered questions, were told whether they were right or wrong, and were then given the correct answer.
The information was available either way. But people tended to learn less after being told they were wrong.
The researchers found that failure can threaten the ego, which may make us less likely to pay attention to the very information that could help us improve.
And here’s the fascinating part. When people watched someone else get an answer wrong, they were much better at learning from the feedback that followed. The information was easier to absorb when their own ego wasn’t involved. That feels familiar, doesn’t it?
We can sometimes see exactly what our friend should try next while remaining utterly convinced that our own mistake is evidence of a deeply flawed personality.
So maybe the mistake itself isn’t always the biggest obstacle. Sometimes it’s how personally we take it. A mistake with our own name on it can start to feel like a grade on our worth, and that can make it harder to stay curious.
Which is exactly why Edison’s notebooks matter. A notebook doesn’t have an ego. It gives us a place to put the information down on paper and look at what actually happened, instead of everything our 2 a.m. brain would like to add to it.
The Two-Minute Notebook
None of us needs Edison’s laboratory or three thousand notebooks. One will do.
The next time something lands wrong or goes wrong, before the story about what this says about me gets too far down the road, we can try writing three things:
- What I tried.
- What happened. Just the facts, without turning them into a judgment.
- What I’ll try next.
That’s it. Three lines. Maybe two minutes. Then we can close the notebook and go live our lives.
There’s one small catch that may make this work even better: keep line two as factual as possible.
“Budget went over by $200” gives us information. “I’m terrible with money” gives us a story about ourselves.
“The conversation ended before we resolved anything” is information. “That conversation was a complete disaster and I clearly cannot communicate with anyone” is… well, that’s our brain getting a little theatrical. We’ve all got one of those brains.
The goal isn’t to pretend something went well when it didn’t. It’s simply to separate what happened from what we decided it means about us. Try it for a week and see what you notice.
The events themselves may not change. We’ll still miss things, misjudge things, say something awkward, overspend occasionally, and discover that 5:30 a.m. remains an unreasonable hour.
But our relationship with those moments may begin to shift. Instead of grading ourselves, we can start running experiments.
And one important reality check
Nobody here wants to turn this into a bumper sticker. Setbacks don’t automatically make us stronger. Often “just learn from failure” can become another way to put pressure on ourselves.
Sometimes we learn from it. Sometimes we need help processing it. Sometimes we need to rest. Sometimes the lesson takes a while to become visible. And sometimes we simply need another person beside us while we figure out what comes next.
A word about who’s reading this
Many of us reading this probably aren’t in crisis. We may just be tired of grading ourselves every time we make a mistake (and we’ve established that having our own notebook of “feedback” can help us with that).
However, there are some of us who may be in a harder place than a notebook can reach.
If that “verdict voice” has been running the show for weeks rather than hours, talking with someone who does this for a living may be a much more useful next step. Nothing in this article is meant to substitute for real care when real care is needed.
Reaching for that care isn’t a failure. It might be the most important thing we do.
And some of us may be reading this with someone else in mind. A friend. A kid. A parent. Someone who’s been calling nearly everything a failure lately.
We probably can’t hand another person a brand-new filing system. But we can sit beside them while they look at the page. In our experience, sometimes that’s the most helpful and loving thing we can do.
The takeaway
Edison wasn’t a legend because he could withstand 10,000 failures.The more interesting lesson may be that he didn’t file his results that way.
All of us already have plenty of results. Budgets. Conversations. Workouts. Applications. Check-ins. Plans that worked beautifully and plans that fell apart by Wednesday. The whole beautiful mess.
Maybe the question isn’t whether every result was good. Maybe it’s simply: Which folder are we putting it in?
And if something has been sitting in the “failure” folder for a long time, maybe we don’t have to move the whole thing today.
We could just open it, take another look and see if there’s any useful information hiding inside.
Standing Tall exists because of one simple belief, and we’ve watched it prove meaningful again and again: every one of us is more powerful than any circumstance, situation, or condition. Definitely more powerful than one bad month.
We don’t always get to pick the result. We do get to decide what we do with it.
If one particular thing came to mind while you were reading this, something that’s been sitting in the “failure” folder for a while, we’d love to hear about it. Tell us below, or send this to the friend who’s been reviewing their entire life based on one rough week.
That’s how this community works. One person opens a notebook, and somebody nearby feels a little less alone opening theirs.
And if Standing Tall has ever helped you find a next step and you’d like to help someone else find theirs, there are plenty of ways to do that. An hour of your time, a share, or a gift toward a scholarship all count. None of it has to be big.
With love and hope,
Colleen and The Standing Tall Igniting Hope Team
