My friend and artist Juan Carlos Rica sends me a sentence without telling me its source. I read it twice: it comes from an interview with Tim Hunt in XL Semanal, and it states, more or less, that in science one spends the majority of one's time being wrong and suffering, that what captivates is the game itself, and that if one only enjoys winning, one will struggle, because one almost always loses.
Almost always, one loses. Not as a lament, but as a description of the craft. And I thought that this, which, coming from a scientist, sounds like a confession, is in our work simply the daily reality, and that I have spent years not saying it aloud because it is not considered appropriate.
Because it is not considered appropriate. What is taught, what is rewarded, what is hung on the wall, is the success: the finished painting, the accepted manuscript, the sentence that finally says what you meant. The entire apparatus of culture is built on the result, on the piece that worked. And that piece is, almost always, the sole survivor of a long series of failures that no one sees, because failure is rarely put on show: it is thrown away, erased, painted over.
A painting that succeeds carries beneath it layers of paintings that did not. This is not a metaphor: it is physically underneath, covered. A text that holds together is what remained after cutting three versions that did not. And to view one's own draft with hostile eyes, to seek out the sentence that a malicious reader would refute, is nothing other than provoking failure in myself before another can provoke it for me. To lose first, in private, so as not to lose later in public. The majority of what I do is exactly that: being wrong in solitude as a method.
I once perceived it as a flaw, believing that doubt and discarding ideas were symptoms of inadequacy, and that if I had to redo something ten times, it was because I had not thought it through sufficiently the first time. It took me time to understand that the inverse is true: that redoing something ten times is not the price of failure, but the very method of creation. Error is not what occurs when work goes awry; it is the material from which work is fashioned, much as a painter works with pigment and a writer with words. One works with one's own shortcomings, observing them, discarding them, learning from them what is not, and through that process of elimination, drawing closer to what is.
The sentence from the interview says something more, and it is not motivational: that the fun is the game itself. That if you place your enjoyment in winning, you have placed your joy in what almost never happens, and you have condemned yourself to a life of bitter waiting. And that the way out is not to win more but to shift the enjoyment from the result to the process, from the finished piece to the stretch of time spent making it, turning it over, trying things, suspecting that you almost have it even though you do not.
The best hours of my work are the ones in the middle, when I am inside the problem and still do not know how it will turn out, when I try one thing and it fails and I try another, and there is a concentration there, a state of complete absorption, that never comes back once I call the work finished. Finishing produces a brief, almost administrative satisfaction. The work, the real work, the one that hooks you, happens earlier, in the thick of error, while you are still losing.
I do not know whether this holds for science as lived by those who practise it; I am borrowing the phrase, not speaking about a laboratory I do not know. But it holds, word for word, for what we do. Almost always, one loses, yes. And anyone who only enjoys winning should take up something else, because here victory is rare and error is constant. If error embitters you, you will be embittered almost every day.
Stated like this, it does not sound like a condemnation but like a relief. Knowing that losing is the norm removes an immense pressure: the pressure of having to get it right. You sit down to work knowing that today's attempt will probably not come off, without the weight of it having to. Success, when it arrives, comes as a surprise inside a routine of failures, and it is enjoyed more precisely because it was not expected. Playing, almost always losing, turns out to be a rather good way to spend your days.
Thank you, Juan Carlos, for the phrase. It was the one I needed to hear on a day when, like almost every other, I was losing.
On the open conversation
This text came out of a sentence sent to me by Juan Carlos Rica, taken from an interview with Tim Hunt in XL Semanal: that in science one spends most of the time being wrong, and that what hooks you is the game, not the winning. It is not a text about science or about its author, but about what that idea made me think regarding error in creative work, understood not as the failure that precedes success, but as the very material one works with. If it strikes a chord with anyone from their own trade, whatever it may be, this notebook remains open.
Sources
The phrase that triggered this text comes from Carlos Manuel Sánchez's interview with Tim Hunt in XL Semanal (August 2026 edition). The formulation circulating on social media is a highlight condensed by the publication from several of the interview's responses, rather than a continuous literal quote; hence, it is paraphrased here. The text is a personal reflection based on that idea, not a commentary on the interview or its author.