Why Does Soichiro Honda Say Success Is 1% of the Work?

David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says Soichiro Honda treated success as 1% of the work and the other 99% as failure. Success, in Honda's words, can only be achieved through repeated failure, and only by facing challenges with a pioneer spirit. Senra connects that to the Edisonian principle Honda shared with James Dyson: learn by doing, fail and fail again, then succeed.

Honda's other rule was that technology should serve people. Technology is a tool for a better life, and nothing more. Some people mistake the means for the end and treat scientific technology itself as the goal. Honda thought that was dangerous and wrong, including the tendency to put the machine ahead of the person using it. His line was not to be used by the machine, but to use the machine. The solution to any problem, he kept saying, should be sought at its root.