The joke inverts the correct order of the three words, and it is used approvingly. The point is that aiming after firing is possible, and that firing supplies information aiming cannot.
The Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk
Before the powered flight of 1903 came years of gliders, launched and crashed and rebuilt on the same stretch of sand. They built their own wind tunnel because the published lift tables were wrong. They did not calculate their way to flight. They flew, repeatedly and badly, until it worked.
Chapter 11
American bankruptcy law lets a company reorganize and continue rather than liquidate. The business keeps trading while it restructures. Iteration written into commercial law: the failure is a state to pass through, not an ending.
Minimum Viable Product
Build the smallest thing that can be put in front of a real user, ship it, and learn from what happens. The word viable is doing the work. Not good, not finished — just alive enough to generate information.
Move fast and break things
Facebook’s internal motto for its first decade. Not move fast and be careful. The breaking is named, accepted, and put in the sentence. It was retired in 2014, which is itself part of the story — the company iterated on its own motto.
Fail fast
Two words, and the logic is compressed into them. Failure is assumed. The only variable worth managing is how quickly it arrives, because a slow failure costs more than a fast one to reach the same information.
The Agile Manifesto
From 11 to 13 February 2001, seventeen software practitioners met at a ski lodge at Snowbird, Utah, and in three days wrote sixty-eight words. The fourth of the four values is the one that matters here: responding to change over following a plan. Not instead of a plan — over it. The plan is acknowledged as valuable and then explicitly ranked second to the ability to change course.
Edison’s actual words
The quote everyone knows — I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work — is a later paraphrase. Edison is not recorded saying it.
The documented version comes from his associate Walter S. Mallory, in the 1910 biography Edison: His Life and Inventions. Edison had run over nine thousand experiments on a nickel-iron battery without success. When Mallory offered sympathy, Edison replied: results, why man, I have gotten a lot of results, I know several thousand things that won’t work.
Not the light bulb, and not ten thousand. But the reframe is genuine and it is his: a failed experiment is a result.