Quotes:
    "Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000.  No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him.  Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?"
    - Thomas J. Watson (1874-1956)

 - "I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work." Thomas Edison's response to the question of how he felt about his failure to make a light bulb.

  "Ninety percent of everything is crap." -- Sturgeon's Law

  "Ten percent of everything is potentially invaluable, and the rest is fertilizer!" --Abbe's Corollary to Sturgeon's Law

There is a proverb about a week-long pottery competition between two groups. One group was offered a prize for producing the single best pot produced by anyone in the group. The second group was offered a prize for the person who produced the most pots. At the end of the week, all of the finest pots had been produced by the second group, because they had learned so much from all the mistakes they had made producing hundreds of pots.