Emerson: experiments

“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Petroski: value of failure

Q: You mentioned the historical record, and in your books you write about a 30-year pattern with bridge collapses. Describe that. People have studied bridge building over almost a century and a half or more, and it’s been well-documented. They have noticed that there is a major bridge failure about every 30 years. The question is, why 30 years? One of the explanations is that this is about the duration of a professional generation. An engineer’s career is about 30 years long, roughly. What happens is that these young engineers are coming in and the older engineers are, at the same time, moving out. The older engineers have all this wisdom and experience. But many organizations don’t have a formal procedure for taking that knowledge that’s in the older generation and imparting it to the newer generation. Or even if they do, the younger generation is sort of cocky and thinks they know more. After all, they’ve just gone through school and they’ve learned the latest stuff. So even if there is an attempt to pass on the wisdom to the younger generation, the younger generation either rejects it or doesn’t take it very seriously. Then the younger generation, depending on where it comes in the cycle, if it doesn’t experience failures directly due to its own miscalculations, it gets cocky. It gets comfortable, overconfident and complacent, and all of those qualities welcome mistakes and they lead to failure   (Interview with Henry Petroski, reprinted at Q-ideas)

Spurgeon: Dreary Sabbaths

By our making the Sabbath dreary, many young minds may be prejudiced against religion: we would do the reverse. Sermons should not be so long and full as to weary young folk, or mischief will come of them, but with interesting preaching to secure attention, and loving teachers to press home the truth upon the youthful heart...

CH Spurgeon, The Early Years, p5

Green: what chance of success?

It was a small group of eleven men whom Jesus commissioned to carry on his work, and bring the gospel to the whole world.  They were not distinguished; they were not well-educated; they had no influential backers. In their own nation they were nobodies and, in any case, their own nation was a mere secondclass province on the eastern extremity of the Roman map.  If they had stopped to weigh up the possibilities of succeeding in their mission, even granted their conviction that Jesus was alive and that his Spirit went with them to equip them for their task, their hearts must surely have sunk, so heavily were the odds weighted against them.  How could they possibly succeed? And yet they did.

Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church, p13