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How to learn from your mistakes
如何从错误中学习
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery,” wrote James Joyce in “Ulysses”.
“错误是通往发现的入口。”詹姆斯·乔伊斯在《尤利西斯》中写道。
In 1888 Lee Kum Sheung, a young cook in a coastal province in southern China, forgot the oyster soup he was boiling on the stove until it simmered down to a thick, sticky gravy.
1888年，中国南部沿海省份的年轻厨师李锦裳忘记了炉子上还煮着生蚝汤，直到汤煮成了浓稠、黏腻的肉汁。
Once he discovered how tasty it was, he decided to sell his “oyster sauce” in jars. That lucky mistake would make him and his heirs rich. Your guest Bartleby has not been so fortunate in her mistakes.
他一发现这肉汁非常美味，就决定把“蚝油”装在罐子里出售。这个歪打正着使他和他的继承人们变成了富翁。笔者犯的错就没这么幸运了。
From fat-fingered spreadsheet errors and incoherent interventions in meetings to failed mergers and bungled products, failure is a part of corporate life. Yet even the most humiliating mistake can prove to be useful.
从电子表格中的手滑和开会时前言不搭后语的插嘴，到失败的合并和搞砸的产品，失败是公司生活的一部分。然而，即使是最丢脸的错误也可能被证明是有用的。
Some failures can be chalked up to a lack of experience. Katharine Graham wrote in her autobiography of the many ignominious blunders she made after she became the publisher of the Washington Post overnight, following her husband’s suicide.
有些失败可以归咎于缺乏经验。凯瑟琳·格雷厄姆在她的自传中写道，在她丈夫自杀后，她一夜之间成为了《华盛顿邮报》的发行商，之后她犯了许多可耻的愚蠢错误。
“I made endless unnecessary mistakes and died over them,” she wrote.
“我犯了无数不该犯的错误，而且后悔得想死。”她写道。
Of course, even those with plenty of experience are not infallible. In “Right Kind of Wrong”, Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, explores how to build a healthy relationship with failure.
当然，即使是经验丰富的人也不是万无一失的。在《正确的错误》一书中，哈佛商学院教授艾米·埃德蒙森探讨了如何与失败建立健康的关系。
In a complex world, she argues, excellence requires taking risks. The important thing is to establish what needs to be done differently next time. For companies the occasional failure may be the price of innovation.
她认为在复杂的世界中，追求卓越需要承担风险。重要的是要确定下一次需要做出什么改变。对于公司来说，偶尔的失败可能是创新的代价。
Within months of the Amazon Fire smartphone being introduced in 2014 it was clear to all that the device was a resounding flop, with Amazon forced to write off $83m of unsold inventory.
2014年，亚马逊Fire智能手机发布后的几个月内，所有人都清楚地看到这款设备是一次彻底的失败，亚马逊被迫将价值8300万美元的未售出库存作资产减值计提。
The device was late to the market and had limited features, but was nonetheless priced in the same range as the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy.
该设备上市太晚，功能有限，但定价却与iPhone和三星Galaxy处于同一档。
Jeff Bezos, the tech giant’s chief executive at the time, would later argue that such misfires were the cost of an organisation relentlessly focused on continual innovation. “If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now,” he said two years after the fiasco.
当时的亚马逊CEO杰夫·贝佐斯后来争辩说，这种失误是组织坚持不懈地专注于持续创新的代价。“如果你认为那是一次重大失败，那么我们现在正在进行更大的失败。”他在那次惨败两年后说道。
Mistakes are unavoidable. But they are rarely the end of the story. Graham went on to transform the Washington Post from a city newspaper into a respected national institution; Amazon’s market value today is around 15 times what it was when it made its disastrous foray into phones.
错误是不可避免的。但错误很少是故事的结局。格雷厄姆后来将《华盛顿邮报》从城市报纸转变为受人尊敬的全国性文化机构，亚马逊今天的市值大约是它灾难性地进军手机市场时的15倍。
