Success Quote by Koichi Tanaka

Failure is the unglamorous default setting of real engineering, and Tanaka’s line refuses to let us pretend otherwise. Coming from a working scientist (not a motivational poster), it reads less like pessimism than like an operating manual: development engineering isn’t the careful polishing of a known thing; it’s the messy, expensive search for what doesn’t work so you can inch toward what might.

The intent is almost corrective. In a culture that rewards product launches, keynote triumphalism, and the “genius breakthrough” narrative, Tanaka points to the hidden ledger of R&D: dead ends, broken prototypes, negative results, and the dozens of discarded approaches that never become a paper, a patent, or a headline. The subtext is a quiet defense of process over myth. If most attempts fail, then failure isn’t evidence of incompetence; it’s the toll you pay for novelty. The engineer’s job becomes less “build the thing” than “design experiments that fail fast, fail informatively, and fail without taking the whole project down.”

There’s also a managerial barb embedded in the calm phrasing. If leadership expects a straight line from idea to impact, they will misread the normal turbulence of development as waste, and they’ll start optimizing for optics rather than discovery. Tanaka’s statement asks for a different ethic: judge engineers by the quality of their questions, the rigor of their iteration, and the learning extracted from collapse. That’s how breakthroughs are actually manufactured: out of a graveyard of prototypes that did their job by dying.