Education Quote by John Sculley

Mistakes, in Sculley’s framing, aren’t a blemish on competence; they’re the receipt for ambition. Coming from a CEO who helped scale Apple and later became a symbol of its internal power struggle, the line reads less like a generic pep talk and more like executive self-justification: if outcomes are messy, that mess can be recast as evidence you were playing at the right altitude.

The first sentence borrows the language of humility while quietly asserting expertise. “I have found” is managerial empiricism, the voice of someone who’s run experiments on reality and can report back. It’s also a neat reframing: successes are treated as shallow feedback, mistakes as rich data. That sounds rigorous, even scientific, but it contains a subtle dodge. If failure is always the best teacher, then failure becomes narratively useful, not merely costly.

The second sentence pushes the point from reflection into ideology. It turns risk-taking into a moral metric: no mistakes equals not enough courage. That’s a powerful cultural move in business because it preemptively stigmatizes caution and elevates disruption. It aligns with late-20th-century Silicon Valley mythology, where “move fast” gets retroactively sanctified as “learn fast.”

Still, the quote’s punch comes from its asymmetry: it offers comfort to the risk-taker and a quiet warning to the risk-averse, while leaving out the inconvenient truth that not all mistakes are informative, and some “chances” are gambles with other people’s money, jobs, or time. That omission is the subtext that gives the line its executive sheen.