Think about the last time something you made fell flat. Maybe a painting that looked like a muddy mess, a business idea that went nowhere, or a piece of code that crashed the whole system. That sinking feeling is hard to shake, but here’s the twist: some of the most celebrated creative works in history came directly from things that didn’t work the first time. The difference between a dead end and a breakthrough is often just a small shift in how you look at the failure.

Take the story of the Post-it Note. In 1968, a 3M scientist named Spencer Silver was trying to develop a super-strong adhesive. Instead, he ended up with a weak glue that could stick to surfaces but be peeled off easily. By almost any measure, that experiment was a failure. The glue was useless for its original purpose. Silver didn’t throw it away, though. He kept showing it to colleagues, talking about what it could do rather than what it couldn’t. Years later, another 3M employee named Art Fry was frustrated by bookmarks falling out of his church hymnal. He remembered Silver’s weak adhesive and realized it could hold a bookmark without damaging the page. That failure in the lab became one of the most ubiquitous office supplies in the world. It wasn’t a mistake that needed hiding. It was a raw material that needed a new context.

Or consider the invention of penicillin. Alexander Fleming wasn’t looking for a miracle drug. He was a bacteriologist studying staph bacteria, and he left a petri dish uncovered by accident. Mold grew in the dish and killed the bacteria around it. Many scientists would have tossed the contaminated sample. Fleming saw it as a puzzle. He didn’t get mad at the mold; he got curious. That one dirty dish changed medicine forever. The lesson is that the messy, unplanned, and “wrong” outcomes often hold the most potential if you’re willing to sit with them for a while.

The creative class—writers, designers, filmmakers, programmers, entrepreneurs—tends to worship the finished product. We see the polished novel, the seamless app, the perfect photograph. We don’t see the stack of crumpled drafts, the broken prototypes, the deleted scenes. But every professional creator knows that the path to a great result is paved with things that didn’t work. The trick is to stop thinking of those things as failures and start thinking of them as data. A failed sketch tells you what your hand doesn’t want to do. A rejected pitch tells you what your audience isn’t hungry for. A broken sculpture tells you which material won’t hold the weight.

This doesn’t mean you should celebrate every mistake or lower your standards. It means you should treat each misstep as a clue. When you reframe failure as learning, you take the emotional sting out of it. You stop wasting energy on shame or blame and start spending that energy on observation. What can this failed attempt teach me about my process? What unexpected shape emerged that I can use in a different project? What assumption did I make that turned out to be wrong?

Look at how jazz musicians improvise. They hit wrong notes all the time. The good ones don’t stop and apologize. They bend that wrong note into the next phrase, making it sound intentional. The audience hears a fluid, creative performance, not a series of corrections. That’s the same mindset you can apply to any creative work. When your idea goes sideways, don’t discard it. Bend it. See where it leads. You might find a new direction you never would have considered if everything had gone perfectly.

History is full of examples. The microwave oven was invented because a radar engineer named Percy Spencer noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket melted when he stood near a magnetron. He didn’t yell at himself for ruining his snack. He ran an experiment with popcorn kernels. The chocolate bar failure became a kitchen revolution. Play-Doh started as a wallpaper cleaner that wasn’t selling. When a schoolteacher realized it could be used for modeling clay, the product pivoted and became a childhood staple. Corn flakes were the result of a batch of boiled wheat that was left out and went stale. The Kellogg brothers didn’t throw it away; they rolled it into flakes and toasted it.

Every one of these stories starts with something that didn’t work as planned. The creators involved weren’t geniuses who never made mistakes. They were normal people who decided to treat their mistakes as experiments rather than verdicts. They asked “What can I learn?” instead of “What did I do wrong?”

If you want to boost your own creativity, the single most useful habit you can build is to lower the stakes on your failures. Make it safe to be wrong. Keep a sketchbook of “ugly” ideas. Save the files from projects that crashed. Record the voice memos you thought were nonsense. Later, when you look back, you’ll often find a seed of something good that you missed in the moment. The only real failure is refusing to look at the data. Everything else is just raw material for the next try.