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I’M AN OPTIMIST BY NATURE
day, no matter the fate of the
project that I happened to be
working on. And every day during
those years I woke up with the same
thought, literally, as I rubbed the
sleep from my eyes and slapped the
alarm clock off.
Today’s the day. If you drill down
on any success story, you always
discover that luck was a huge part
of it. You can’t control luck, but you
can move from a game with bad
odds to one with better odds. You
can make it easier for luck to find
you. The most useful thing you can
do is stay in the game. If your current
get-rich project fails, take what you
learned and try something else.
Keep repeating until something lucky
happens. The universe has plenty of
luck to go around; you just need to
keep your hand raised until it’s your
turn. It helps to see failure as a road
and not a wall.
I’m an optimist by nature, or
perhaps by upbringing—it’s hard
to know where one leaves off and
the other begins—but whatever the
cause, I’ve long seen failure as a
tool, not an outcome. I believe that
viewing the world in that way can
be useful for you too.
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Nietzsche famously
said, “What doesn’t kill us makes
us stronger.” It sounds clever, but it’s
a loser philosophy. I don’t want my
failures to simply make me stronger,
which I interpret as making me better
able to survive future challenges.
“YOU CAN’T
CONTROL
LUCK, BUT YOU
CAN MOVE
FROM A GAME
WITH BAD
ODDS TO ONE
WITH BETTER
ODDS. YOU
CAN MAKE IT
EASIER FOR
LUCK TO FIND
YOU”
(To be fair to Nietzsche, he
probably meant the word “stronger”
to include anything that makes you
more capable. I’d ask him to clarify,
but ironically he ran out of things that
didn’t kill him.)
Becoming stronger is obviously
a good thing, but it’s only barely
optimistic. I do want my failures to
make me stronger, of course, but I
also want to become smarter, more
talented, better networked, healthier
and more energized. If I find a
cow turd on my front steps, I’m not
satisfied knowing that I’ll be mentally
prepared to find some future cow
turd. I want to shovel that turd onto
my garden and hope the cow returns
every week so I never have to buy
fertilizer again. Failure is a resource
that can be managed.
I’m delighted to admit that I’ve
failed at more challenges than
anyone I know.
As for you, I’d like to think that
reading this will set you on the path
of your own magnificent screw-ups
and cavernous disappointments.
You’re welcome! And if I forgot to
mention it earlier, that’s exactly where
you want to be: steeped to your
eyebrows in failure.
It’s a good place to be because
failure is where success likes to hide
in plain sight. Everything you want
out of life is in that huge, bubbling
vat of failure. The trick is to get the
good stuff out. NH
EASTER ISSUE 2015 / NORTHERN HILLS / PAGE 45