on screwing up

So Sue and I went to a lecture by Meg Hourihan, co-founder of Blogger.com. Interesting stuff, and interesting message: in a few words, keep screwing up until you find something that makes you happy.

To give you some background, Blogger was a complete accident. Meg and her business partner hired a developer to work on a project management application. This guy, who was just referred to as "Paul" in the lecture, created the blogging engine as a side project. Still, the company faltered, Meg left, and eventually Blooger was bought by Google. Since then, Meg helped run another company into the ground, worked as a chef, and now does nothing. With the exception of the whole entreprenual thing, sounds like a typical story of a Tufts graduate with an English major.

What's interesting is that no one, and certainly not Meg, focused on the failures: all of them were presented as "learning experiences". I was suddenly reminded of the incident a few years back, when an American crew had to land a spy plane in China because of a mechanical problem. Their failure to destroy sensitive equipment dealt a huge blow to the intelligence community, yet when they came back to the US, they were treated as heroes.

In Russia, they'd be shot.