Success Quote by John Poindexter

Poindexter’s line dresses itself up as sober, engineering-minded realism: experiments fail, so failure is evidence of ambition. It’s a seductive managerial aphorism because it turns an ugly word into a progress metric. In one stroke, it reframes risk not as recklessness but as discipline. The phrasing is doing the work. “Accept” signals maturity; “possible outcome” sounds probabilistic, almost neutral; “objectives” implies legitimacy, as if the goals are already agreed upon and only execution remains.

The subtext is more complicated, especially from a career public servant whose name is inseparable from the Iran-Contra era and the broader national-security culture that prizes secrecy, speed, and plausible deniability. In that world, calling actions “experiments” can shrink moral and democratic questions into technical ones. Who designed the experiment? Who consented to being part of it? When it fails, who pays?

“If you don’t get failures, you’re not pushing hard enough” also functions as a preemptive defense: criticism becomes evidence you’re doing serious work. That’s useful rhetoric inside bureaucracies where incentives often punish caution while outsourcing consequences. It’s the logic of “move fast” translated from Silicon Valley into governance, minus the comforting fiction that you can simply roll back an update.

The line’s power is its plausible pragmatism. Its danger is how easily it can launder accountability: failure becomes not a warning light, but a badge.