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Failure is My Second Favorite F-Word
If you want to be successful you need to study failure
We are a culture obsessed with success. We love reading about people who have accumulated ungodly amounts of money and power. We binge podcasts and videos that promise to teach us how to build passive income empires.
You can make a great living writing about the secrets of success to a credulous audience.
But success is boring.
In the opening of his masterpiece Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy writes:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The same is true of success. Every successful person, every business success is the same. But every failure is its own unique disastrous chain of unfortunate events and mistakes.
Failure is fascinating.
Failure is also much more instructive than success is. But failure is a much harder subject to study.
Most of us don’t want to think about our failures. We have been conditioned to believe that we must be happy and positive to be successful, and ruminating on a painful failure is neither happy nor positive.
