Joyce understood something that mere optimism about failure misses: mistakes don't just teach us what not to do—they reveal the actual structure of things. When a writer's sentence falls apart, she discovers something about the limits of language itself; when a bridge calculation fails, engineers learn what physics genuinely requires. The insight rescues us from the tired notion that mistakes are simply stepping stones, as though they're interchangeable training exercises. A surgeon's error, properly examined, opens onto knowledge about anatomy or technique that no textbook quite captured—which is precisely why medicine progresses through carefully documented failures rather than successes alone.