It was Samuel Beckett, of the patiently waiting fame, who had advised, ‘Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Steve Jobs, perhaps in his absurdist days in the garage with Steve Wozniak, may or may not have been inspired by Beckett’s line to come up with: ‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’ (Jobs actually took the line from the back cover of 1970s ‘counterculture’ magazine, Whole Earth Catalog.) But as it happens, Beckett’s famous line, from his 1983 story Worstward Ho, may have been picked up by another techie, Elon ‘X’ Musk. Not only has he taken to the idea of ‘failing better’ super successfully, but with the boom-bam of his SpaceX Starship rocket minutes after its test launch on Thursday, Musk also reformatted the way failure should be described. Instead of saying the launch failed, he tweeted how Starship experienced a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’. Instead of saying: ‘Starship went kaboom.’
Seeing a half-empty glass of water as being half-full is one thing. But categorising destruction as de-construction is taking positivity to a new level. Actually, not completely new. Gwyneth Paltrow, whose closest shave with tech has been acting as Pepper Potts in the Iron Man movie franchise, had announced her divorce with Chris Martin as ‘conscious uncoupling’. Unscheduled disassembly has now taken that Beckettian top spot.
