Success Quote by Dean Kamen

Big failure is an expensive kind of freedom: it’s what you earn when you stop optimizing for safety and start optimizing for impact. Dean Kamen’s line lands because it refuses the polite morality tale where “trying your best” is the reward. Instead, it treats failure as a cost of admission to meaningful invention, not a personal indictment. Coming from an inventor whose career lives in prototypes, dead ends, and improbable bets (from medical devices to the Segway to DEKA’s moonshot-ish projects), the quote reads less like motivational poster wisdom and more like lab-floor pragmatism.

The specific intent is permission-giving, but with teeth. Kamen isn’t urging recklessness; he’s attacking small-minded risk management - the instinct to choose problems that are survivable, fundable, and easily narrated. “The big ones” implies messy systems: health care logistics, clean water, mobility, robotics - domains where the failure modes are public, costly, and humiliating. That’s precisely why most people avoid them. He’s making avoidance look like the real failure.

The subtext is also about identity. If you’re an inventor, failing at trivial projects isn’t noble; it’s misallocation. You don’t get extra credit for collapsing on the kiddie slopes. By framing ambition as the rational choice even under the shadow of defeat, Kamen flips the emotional math: the embarrassment of a high-profile miss becomes preferable to the slow, comfortable irrelevance of never taking the swing.

Context matters here: late-20th-century innovation culture lionized disruption, but Kamen’s version is old-school engineering bravado - measured in working machines and stubborn iteration, not vibes.