Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce
The meaning of the quote
In 1912, a Dublin printer burned the finished pages of a short story collection rather than hand them to the author. The author was James Joyce and the book was Dubliners. Joyce saved one copy by a ruse and kept sending the book out until it was published in 1914.
The quote comes from his later novel, Ulysses. A young teacher named Stephen Dedalus says it in the National Library of Dublin while arguing that Shakespeare’s life fed his plays. One of his listeners compares Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, to the ill-tempered wife of Socrates. Stephen defends the marriage by saying a genius’s errors are chosen ones that open the way to discovery.
Stephen’s word for these errors is “volitional,” which means chosen. They come from a person who acted on purpose and tried something hard, and that is why they lead somewhere. A portal is a door, and the quote treats a mistake as the way into something new.
In 1968, 3M scientist Spencer Silver set out to make a super-strong glue and ended up with a weak, reusable one that he pitched inside the company for 5 years with no luck. In 1974 a colleague named Arthur Fry used it to keep a bookmark from slipping out of his hymn book, and the glue became the Post-it Note.
You can find more stories like this in Learning through mistakes: From Einstein to Edison, and the quote on why learning requires confusion makes a related point.
Action steps
A mistake only opens a door if you look at where it leads. These 3 steps help you do that.
- Write your mistakes down. Keep a short list this week, including the small ones. Next to each, write one thing you know now that you didn’t know before.
- Ask what the mistake made possible. Before you fix it, spend 5 minutes on that question.
- Try something you might get wrong. Pick one thing you’ve been putting off for fear of messing it up and start it this week.
Your next mistake could be a door too.
About the author
James Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish novelist who grew up in Dublin in a family sliding into debt. In 1891 his father’s name appeared in a public list of debtors and bankrupts.
In 1904 Joyce left Ireland with Nora Barnacle and settled in Trieste, where the couple made a living teaching English.
Dubliners went out 18 times to 15 publishers between 1905 and 1914. A London publisher backed out over the language in the stories and a Dublin one refused to print it. The book finally came out on June 15, 1914, more than 8 years after Joyce first sent it.
Ulysses ran in installments in the American magazine The Little Review from 1918 to 1920. A court ruled in 1921 that one episode was obscene, and the book was effectively banned in the United States. The Post Office burned copies throughout the 1920s.
A Paris bookseller named Sylvia Beach, who ran the shop Shakespeare and Company, published the first edition on February 2, 1922.
It was Joyce’s 40th birthday, 10 years after a Dublin printer burned the pages of Dubliners, and the book that came out that day is where you can find this quote.
Resources
- Ulysses (Book)
- Dubliners (Book)
- Learning through mistakes: From Einstein to Edison (Article)
- Learning requires confusion (Article)
- Ulysses Episode 9: Scylla and Charybdis Summary (Article)
- Ulysses (novel) (Wikipedia)
- Post-it Note (Wikipedia)
Leave feedback about this