Failure: We all avoid it, and most of us fear it. However, without failure, progress would be impossible. Indeed, the word success comes from the Latin succedere, meaning “to come after.” And what does success usually come after? Failure. It seems that one cannot exist without the other.

 Accepting failure is not easy for many, though. We are often reluctant to admit failure because our professional reputations depend on success. However, things are slowly changing, notably in the field of business and science. In the past decade, for instance, some scientific journals－mostly in medicine and conservation－have published reports of failed experiments. The belief is that the science community can also learn from “negative” results and that this can eventually lead to positive outcomes.

 In many ways, the business world already understands the value of negative results. To encourage entrepreneurship, the Netherlands-based ABN AMRO bank started an Institute of Brilliant Failures to learn more about what works and what doesn’t in banking. Similarly, Eli Lilly and Company, the pharmaceutical corporation, has “R&D outcome celebrations”－failure parties－to study data about drugs that don’t work. (Almost 90 percent of all drug trials fail, and the drugs cannot be sold.)

 In fact, one of the business world’s most famous failures eventually became one of its biggest successes, in part because the product’s makers learned from their mistakes. In the early 1990s, Apple Corporation created a hand-held device called the Apple Newton. The product, though unique at the time, was expensive and heavy; moreover, some of its most important features didn’t work properly. Consequently, it became one of Apple’s biggest failures, and in 1998, the company stopped selling it. However, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, believed the product had potential and he began to explore ways of improving it. In time, this led to the creation of the iPhone and the iPad, two of the company’s most successful products. 

The story of the Apple Newton can teach us another important lesson about failure. Not only should we try to learn from it; if we want to succeed, we must also be persistent. Though Apple stopped selling the Newton in 1998, the first iPhone wasn’t available until 2007. It took a lot of research and hard work to go from the Apple Newton to iPhone, but in the end, the effort paid off. 

Ultimately, there is a lot we can learn by studying mistakes. Perhaps the most important lesson is that failure and success are two sides of the same coin. One truly cannot exist without the other.