You have to get bad in order to get good. You have to try a lot of things and fail in order to make the next discovery.

That works in a short-term methodology when you’re just working on a specific project, but also long-term in terms of a whole career. I find I make big discoveries and I make huge leaps and then I repeat myself and I’ll be known for what I did—I’ll get the acclaim for the breakthrough—and that elevates everyone’s expectation of who I am and what I’m supposed to do, and I will repeat that because it has become successful.

And I will repeat it and repeat it until it provokes my utter failure because I’m going along doing exactly what I did. And it’s very hard to make the breakthrough because in order to make the breakthrough again, to go up again, you either have to fail or be unqualified for a job where you don’t know what you’re doing, where you make honest mistakes because that’s how you learn. And that success is its own guarantee of failure.