Life & Wisdom Quote by Roger von Oech

Mistakes usually get treated like stains: something to scrub out fast so nobody notices. Roger von Oech flips that reflex into a creative tactic. The line isn’t offering comfort; it’s giving you permission to keep moving while you’re wrong, which is a far more radical instruction than it sounds. “Use it” is the operative phrase. An error becomes raw material, not a verdict.

The subtext is an argument with perfectionism and with the culture of optimization that punishes deviation. Von Oech, known for popularizing creative-thinking tools, is writing in a late-20th-century self-help/business ecosystem where innovation is praised but failure is still stigmatized. His quote bridges that hypocrisy: if you actually want new ideas, you have to tolerate the messy, inefficient path that produces them. The “stepping stone” metaphor matters because it’s pragmatic. Stepping stones are uneven and half-submerged; you don’t stop to admire them, you use them to cross.

There’s also a quiet reframing of agency. Errors “happen,” but discovery is something you actively do. The best ideas, the quote implies, aren’t always the result of genius marching forward; they’re often accidents you choose not to waste. It’s an endorsement of tinkering, of prototypes, of the lab mindset where “wrong” is simply data with better marketing.