Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all th... — Dean Kamen

Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile.

Author: Dean Kamen

Insight: There's something almost liberating about admitting that failure is the baseline. Most people frame success as the expectation and failure as the exception, which means every setback feels like a personal betrayal. But flipping that script changes everything. If you expect to fail most of the time, you're not constantly shocked and demoralized—you're just doing the work, showing up, and treating success like the occasional gift it actually is. The real insight isn't just that failure is normal; it's that this mindset lets you stay in the game long enough to catch those occasional wins. Think about learning to cook, starting a business, or even dating. The people who keep going aren't the ones who never burned dinner or faced rejection—they're the ones who stopped believing every failure meant something was wrong with them. They built their expectations around reality instead of against it. What makes this worthwhile isn't that the occasional success erases the hard work. It's that you finally stop expecting it to. Once you accept that you're playing a numbers game rather than chasing some mythical perfect outcome, the victories feel genuine and motivating rather than like proof you finally got it right. The sacrifice remains real, but it stops feeling like punishment for something you did wrong.