No physical quantity can continue to change exponentially forever. Your job is delaying forever.
Most of what I learned as an entrepreneur was by trial and error.
I remember the difficulty we had in the beginning replacing magnetic cores in memories and eventually we had both cost and performance advantages. But it wasn't at all clear in the beginning.
The number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double in about 18 months.
Moore's law is really about economics.
With engineering, I view this year's failure as next year's opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.