How Mistakes Can Change Your Life for the Better
And why you should study your mistakes instead of ignoring them.
In 1956, World War II Navy veteran Wilson Greatbatch was teaching electrical engineering in the city of Buffalo. He was also moonlighting at the Chronic Disease Institute, where a physician had recruited him to help engineer an oscillator that would record heartbeats using the new technology of silicon transistors.
One day, Greatbatch grabbed the wrong transistor from a bag and plugged it into the device. When he switched it on, the device began pulsing with a familiar rhythm, like that of a heartbeat. The transistor wasn’t recording a heartbeat, it was simulating it.
Greatbatch was inspired. For the next two years, he and a surgeon named William Chardack worked on this discovery. Eventually, they invented the first implantable cardiac pacemaker. By 1960, the pacemaker was pulsing in the hearts of 10 human beings.
In effect, Greatbatch’s error created a design that evolved to save or prolong the lives of millions of people around the world.
It’s easy to dismiss an error as just that — an error. Whatever doesn’t lead to an expected outcome is considered noise and dismissed. We obsess over being certain and right. But history is rife with discoveries that…
