Experimentation Quotes

People think innovation is just having a good idea but a lot of it is just moving quickly and trying a lot of things.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions-as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work.If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.

Our garage was basically science fair central.

There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness.

If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.

The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. The hard part is figuring out when to be which. If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.

To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

Long-term thinking levers our existing abilities and lets us do new things we couldn't otherwise contemplate. It supports the failure and iteration required for invention, and it frees us to pioneer in unexplored spaces. Seek instant gratification-or the elusive promise of it-and chances are you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.

AWS is customer obsessed, inventive and experimental, long-term oriented, and cares deeply about operational excellence.

As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We'll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.

One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.

It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces.

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn't even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we'd never have had the light bulb.

I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.