Review
"Trial, Error, and Success is the best book I've read that both recognizes the messy trial-and-error nature of science and shows you how to apply the uncertainty about the future to the real world. The fact is that no one is omniscient, and not even instant access to all the world's knowledge via the Internet can grant certainty about the future, so we need to know how to think and make decisions through strategic intelligence. This book gives you those tools."
—Michael Shermer, Publisher Skeptic magazine, Presidential Fellow Chapman University, author Why People Believe Weird Things, The Believing Brain, and The Moral Arc
"Nelson Mandela famously said, 'I never fail. I either win or I learn.' Similarly, in their fascinating, engaging, and entertaining new book, Sima Dimitrijev and Maryann Karinch demonstrate how and why it is primarily through trial and error, by learning from mistakes, and by reframing failures as feedback, that we gain the courage and the confidence - along with the intellectual and emotional intelligence - to try and to fail, to learn and to grow, and, ultimately, to succeed."
—Todd Cherches, CEO, BigBlueGumball and author of VisuaLeadership: Leveraging the Power of Visual Thinking in Leadership and in Life
"This interesting book is filled with examples that will help you understand and manage uncertainty by rationalizing the risks to your team and management."
—Mike Rosa, Head of Strategic and Technical Marketing, MtM Equipment Product Group, Applied Materials
"... a good deal of sturdy thought and eloquence ... will doubtless prompt some readers to seek out new paradigms."
—Kirkus Review
"I love that the book postulates a brilliant concept, which is the concept of finding alternatives to scientific methods in solving problems. It contains a lot of factual information that leaves the reader with excitement to try out the recommendations made in the book. I love that it didn't just point out the problems of science and generalised knowledge; it gave the solutions to prevent such issues and made recommendations on how to use them to obtain ideal results."
—Online Book Club
"There is tons of detail and information in this book. There is more to trial and error than we might have considered, but this book presents it giving thoughts on the decision-making process based on facts and other things that go along with it. Readers might not think about all these aspects when they go through the process of trial and error with the desire for success, but this book presents many aspects of this concept. It gets you thinking deeply about what goes into each decision and the steps leading to an error as well as a success. We can look around us at the things we have and use. There was a decision process of trial and error that lead to the creation of it. It is an interesting thought inspired by this book."
—The International Review of Books
"Author team Sima Dimitrijev and Maryann Karinch have hit the nail on the head by producing this highly accessible philosophy on the nature of thought and learning from our mistakes. It is often said of the greatest writers, artists, and scientists of the world that their brainwaves were born out of failures and setbacks, and when reading this excellent work of business-minded advice, it's easy to see the truth in that. In terms of organization, the work is well formatted with logical knowledge building chapter by chapter and also arranged nicely to refer back to key sections if you want to study them in greater detail. I truly appreciate any work that asks experts and professionals to take their time, think things through and admit when they are wrong, and I would not hesitate to recommend Trial, Error, and Success to any reader seeking a slower but surer route to success and innovation."
—K.C. Finn, Readers' Favorite
From the Author
An Amazon reader portrayed the book by the following comment: "This book is a fine text for individuals, a very thought provoking text for business persons, and useful heresy for academic sorts."
I can elaborate: It is "heresy for academic sorts" because it shows how the exact sciences ignore the reality of fundamental randomness and uncertainty. Stepping beyond this ignorance, the book shows how to deal with and even benefit from uncertainty by skeptical thinking, strategic decisions, and teamwork based on enlightened self-interests. This bottom-up thinking is fine for individuals and thought provoking for leaders who wish to build teams rather than herds.
About the Author
Sima Dimitrijev is a Professor at Griffith University in Australia. He is an educator, a microelectronic engineer, a researcher, an inventor, and the author of two textbooks. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board, Microelectronics Reliability, Elsevier/Pergamon, and a Senior Member of IEEE.
Maryann Karinch is the author of articles, books, and white papers including 33 commercially published books. She founded The Rudy Agency, a full-service literary agency, in 2004.
