Parenting & Family Quote by Edwin Land

Land’s line is a confidence check disguised as a credo. Coming from an inventor, “science” isn’t lofty theory or lab-coat pageantry; it’s the discipline that stands between a clever person and their most seductive enemy: their own certainty. The phrasing “keep yourself from kidding yourself” lands with a blunt, almost parental tone, as if Land is swatting away the ego’s favorite habit - mistaking a beautiful idea for a true one.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of how innovation often fails. Inventors are professional romantics: they fall hard for prototypes, narratives, and the thrill of “it should work.” Land, who built Polaroid by turning bold hunches into repeatable results, knows that imagination is cheap and self-deception is expensive. Science, in his telling, is less a source of answers than a set of guardrails: controls, replication, measurement, peer scrutiny. Not because people are stupid, but because they’re motivated. We notice what we want to notice. We rationalize what we’ve already invested in. We mistake momentum for proof.

Context matters: Land worked in a century where technology increasingly looked like magic to consumers. His quote punctures that mystique. The “method” is the point - an ongoing procedure that assumes error as the default state. It’s a remarkably modern ethic: humility operationalized. In an era of founder mythologies and viral certainty, Land reminds us that the real breakthrough is not being right; it’s building a process that makes it harder to lie to yourself.