“if you´re not failing all the time, you´re aiming too low”

The words in this post’s title come from an exceptionally concise, just 9:35 minutes, yet stirring lecture titled On Failure, by Portuguese-born MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, who was assassinated in December 2025 by another Portuguese scientist. Loureiro himself suggested a better title might have been In Praise of Failure, because at its core was a daring proposition: failure is not a mark of shame, but the very engine of creation.

Yet if failure truly is the lifeblood of discovery, why does the scientific establishment still punish it like a crime, rewarding caution, conformity, and incrementalism while quietly suffocating intellectual risk? And how many breakthroughs have been delayed, distorted, or buried altogether because scientists, fearing ridicule, rejection, or professional exile, chose safe hypotheses over dangerous truths?

PS – These thoughts echo reflections I shared two years ago in a post titled “The Recipe of a Capitalist (Revered by Russian Academics) and the Lack of Courses on the Skill of Overcoming Failure,” where I highlighted a remarkable German book that dares to honor stories of failure as much as, if not more than, stories of triumph: Gegen die Diktatur der Gewinner (Against the Dictatorship of the Winners).