We encourage failure among young men; we celebrate it... It's a badge of honour for a man. Yet attach those same words and experiences to a woman, and society writes her off.
In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse.
The story of Detroit's bankruptcy was simple enough: Allow capitalism to grow the city, campaign against income inequality, tax the job creators until they flee, increase government spending in order to boost employment, promise generous pension plans to keep people voting for failure. Rinse, wash and repeat.
I don't look at football as a violent, barbaric sport. It's a very spiritual sport, especially for someone facing the challenges during a game: the fear of failure, the fear of getting too big an ego, of making a mistake and everybody criticizing you.
I buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn't really work. So then you don't go back to it. The new Ina Garten cookbook, which is called 'Back to Basics,' I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends.
The advanced stats are great to look at for my long-term goals and what I'm trying to accomplish. It shows me there is an inherent failure in pitching. The luck involved, the factors you can't control. You just have to let go of those and focus on the next batter, the next game.
Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.
There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.
It's true that if it's always going to be that if you win the World Cup or European Championship, you're a success, and if you don't, you're a failure, then you're bedding yourself for a lack of success because there aren't many coaches who have won those things, and there are thousands who haven't.
Cheerfully fessing up to our failures turns crazy mind off, humility and compassion on. I learned this in a karate dojo that had a strange tradition. Everyone there loved recounting failure stories, and after an evening of smacking one another, we'd sit and have a beer while the students swapped tales of martial arts disaster.
I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily, a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.
Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
Part of being a man is learning to take responsibility for your successes and for your failures. You can't go blaming others or being jealous. Seeing somebody else's success as your failure is a cancerous way to live.
Being human means you will make mistakes. And you will make mistakes, because failure is God's way of moving you in another direction.
Trying to change before you're ready isn't likely to be productive. For example, most New Year's resolutions don't last because people spring into action without being prepared for the work it's going to take. Forcing change based on a date on the calendar, rather than a true readiness to transform, can be a setup for failure.
Now I have normal-person fears - fears of failure, of not being smart enough or strong enough or kind enough.
You get so afraid of failure and so afraid of losing and so afraid of not being the best that it's not a natural drive - it's born out of fear of failure. Which helps in Hollywood.
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.
War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.
