Without inventors, we wouldn’t really have anything but ourselves and our basic behaviors. Invention is the backbone of progress; it’s how culture evolves in the place of our now mostly superfluous biological evolution. But for all the inventions that made it into popular use, hundreds of times more failed along the way. The whole process of invention, creation, and distribution is just one checkpoint after another—one potential failure after another. It could be a faulty idea, a great idea in the wrong era, a great idea that someone else beats you to, an idea no one will sell, or an idea beat out by a competing concept. There’s no shortage of ways in which inventors can flounder, even—sometimes especially—the greats.