Order of European Inventors and Innovators
by Ileana Vlad, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist
What keeps someone at the tenth attempt, when the first nine did not work? The question seems to me central to inventiveness, and the usual answer — “he is an optimist by nature” — explains nothing.
5,127
By his own account, James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner before the one that worked. Years of it. The figure circulates as a motivational story, and that is exactly where the interesting part gets lost. Endurance is not the remarkable thing. The remarkable thing is what you have to believe in order to build the 5,127th, after building 5,126 that did not work.
Optimism is not what we think it is
In ordinary speech, optimism means the belief that things will turn out well. In psychology it is something more precise and more useful: an explanatory style — the way you account for what happens to you, especially when something goes wrong.
The difference shows most clearly along three dimensions. The pessimistic explanation of a failure is permanent (“I am no good at this”), global (“I am no good at anything of this sort”) and personal (“there is something in me”). The optimistic explanation is temporary, specific, and tied to something that can be changed: “this seal does not hold at this pressure”.
Notice what each one contains. The second explanation contains the next experiment. The first contains nothing — it is a full stop, not a comma.
Why this matters more here than elsewhere
There are trades in which you succeed most of the time. Technical creation is not one of them. The failure rate is not an accident of the field, it is its structure: if the solution had worked first time, someone else would have found it before you.
In a field where being wrong ninety-nine times is the normal road, explanatory style is not a likeable character trait. It is the infrastructure everything else rests on. An inventor with a pessimistic explanatory style does not reach the prototype that works — not because they are less intelligent, but because they stop earlier.
What optimism is not
It is not denial. The inventor who cannot hear that the prototype does not work is not optimistic, he is stuck — and usually loses more time than a pessimist, because he repeats the same mistake convinced that this time it will hold.
The distinction is simple and worth keeping: optimism is not about the fact of the failure, but about its cause. Honest to the point of harshness about what happened; generous about what it means. The prototype does not work — that is a fact. What it means is an interpretation, and interpretations are chosen.
Can it be learned?
Explanatory style is one of the few things in psychology of which it can be said, with grounds, that it changes with practice. The practice is less spectacular than the self-help shelf would like: you write.
After a failure, note in two lines the explanation that came to you first. Then check it in three respects: is it permanent or temporary? global or specific? about you, or about one particular part? If it is permanent, global and personal, rewrite it. Not to console yourself — to obtain a sentence you can continue from.
For those around an inventor
The least useful question you can ask someone who has been working on something for months is “does it work?”. It is a binary question put to a process that is not binary, and it invariably gets the answer “not yet”, with everything that comes attached to it.
The useful question is “what did you learn from that one?”. It assumes the last attempt produced something — and most of the time it did. A witness who asks that question is worth, in the economy of a long project, several months of work.