"if you´re not failing all the time, you´re aiming too low"
These words come from an exceptionally concise, just 9:35 minutes, yet stirring lecture titled On Failure, by Portuguese-born MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, who was assassinated in December 2025 by another Portuguese scientist. Loureiro himself suggested a better title might have been In Praise of Failure, because at its core was a daring proposition: failure is not a mark of shame, but the very engine of creation.
Yet if failure truly is the lifeblood of discovery, why does the scientific establishment still punish it like a crime, rewarding caution, conformity, and incrementalism while quietly suffocating intellectual risk-taking? And how many transformative breakthroughs might have been delayed, subtly distorted, or effectively buried altogether because scientists, fearing ridicule, professional rejection, or even intellectual exile, deliberately chose safe and defensible hypotheses over high-stakes explanatory possibilities?
These thoughts echo reflections I shared two years ago in a post titled “The Recipe of a Capitalist (Revered by Russian Academics) and the Lack of Courses on the Skill of Overcoming Failure,” where I highlighted a remarkable German book that dares to honor stories of failure as much as, if not more than, stories of triumph: Gegen die Diktatur der Gewinner (Against the Dictatorship of the Winners).
PS - Against this backdrop of reflection on failure and intellectual risk-taking, the empirical record speaks with unusual clarity. Back in 2020 I commented on an article in The Economist reporting that migrants in Germany were more likely than native Germans to start businesses. Two years later, an MIT-led study found that immigrants in the United States are about 80% more likely to found firms than native-born citizens. The latest edition of The Economist demonstrates that the current surge in U.S. startup creation is being driven disproportionately by ethnic minorities and immigrant entrepreneurs. Seen through this lens, the societies that flourish most fully are those courageous enough to embrace people shaped by risk and sharpened by adversity, and thus capable of turning uncertainty into possibilities.
