Science Quote by Thomas J. Watson

Success, Watson suggests, is less a trophy than a byproduct of wreckage. "Double your error rate" sounds like industrial sabotage until you hear the managerial logic behind it: if mistakes are the visible trail of attempts, then an absence of errors usually means an absence of risk. The line flips the cultural preference for polish into a credo for iteration. It flatters the experimenter over the perfectionist, the builder over the committee.

Watson, best known as IBM's hard-driving chief rather than a lab-coat scientist, was speaking from an era when American industry was learning to treat innovation as a system. In that context, error isn't moral failure; it's data. The subtext is a rebuke to the corporate instinct to punish missteps, because punishment breeds concealment, and concealment kills learning. By telling people to increase their error rate, he is quietly asking them to increase their output, their range of bets, their willingness to ship imperfect drafts into the world.

The phrasing is the trick: "the way to succeed" promises certainty, then delivers a paradox. "Double" gives it an engineer's specificity, like a knob you can turn, which makes the provocation feel actionable rather than motivational. It's also a power move: only a leader confident in his institution's capacity to absorb failure can publicly recommend more of it. In practice, it's a demand for velocity - not carelessness, but the kind of disciplined trial-and-error that turns embarrassment into infrastructure.