It’s been one year since I started the Famous Failures podcast, where I interview the world’s most interesting people about their failures and what they learned from them. As you might imagine, asking guests to appear on the show has made for some interesting conversations.
“Hey Dan, I have a podcast where I interview failures. You’d be perfect for it.”
In 1637, Pierre de Fermat scribbled a note on a textbook margin that would baffle mathematicians for more than three centuries.
Fermat had a theory. He proposed that there’s no solution to the formula an + bn = cn for any n greater than 2. “I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition,” he wrote, “which this margin is too narrow to contain.”
Where were you on January 28, 1986?
If you’re American, and you were older than six at the time, the chances are that you know the answer to that question.
In her terrific book on creativity, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert recounts a story about Mike Nichols, who is the prolific director behind many classics including The Graduate (plastics, anyone?).
Although people tend to remember Nichols’s hits, many of his films were flops. Some of the flops would appear from time to time—as flops do—on late-night television. Whenever Nichols would come across one of these failures late at night, he’d grab a bucket of proverbial popcorn, park himself on his couch, and watch the whole thing from start to finish.
