If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

Ken Robinson used this line in the context of arguing that modern schooling and workplace cultures often stigmatize mistakes, which in turn suppresses creativity. He made the point most famously while discussing how children naturally take imaginative risks but learn, through fear of being “wrong,” to avoid experimentation. The remark is closely associated with Robinson’s public talks and writing on creativity, education reform, and the need to cultivate environments where trial, error, and play are treated as essential to learning rather than as failures to be punished.

The quote links originality to risk: genuinely new ideas require stepping beyond established patterns, where outcomes can’t be guaranteed. If a person (or institution) demands certainty and correctness at every step, they will default to safe, conventional answers—reproducing what is already known. Robinson’s point is not that being wrong is desirable, but that tolerating the possibility of error is the price of discovery. In creative work, “wrong” often functions as a stage in iteration: missteps generate information, provoke new associations, and open paths that strict correctness would close off.