There is a no-man’s land in our politics: on the one hand, bounded by what we know to be true, and on the other hand, bounded by what the media says is politically correct. And that’s where Donald Trump lives. And it’s our failure to admit what we all know to be true in the guise of political correctness that fuels the Trump candidacy.
Primarily affecting low-information voters and members of the mainstream media, Obama Worship Syndrome attributes impossible capabilities to Obama’s political opponents, finds excuses for every Obama failure in everyone around him and praises the president as the finest politician – nay, human being – of our time.
The very phrase ‘Oscar night’ used to accelerate my pulse. For one thing – dating myself – it meant Bob Hope. He always had good, strong jokes, that faultless delivery, and always a new joke about his own films’ failure – once again – to be honored.
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.
Like prospecting in the 19th century, reconnaissance of the asteroids would of necessity take place in an arena where trouble is likely and help is distant. Heroic stories of individual triumph and failure, set on landscapes never seen by humankind, are in the cards.
Before I was married, I didn’t consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn’t do ‘do-it-yourself.’ When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers.
It is easy to lay the blame on successive governments for failing to address health as a fundamental right for the Indian people. But the real tragedy is that we, the people of India, have not taken our government to task for this catastrophic failure.
It comes down to the simple idea that government has grown substantially under Barack Obama, and government has been a failure in American’s lives, and Hillary Clinton wants to grow government even further. I think Donald Trump wants to restrain government and shrink government.
The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.
Different parts of the world have different attitudes to failure. Arguably, it may take more courage to be an entrepreneur in Sydney, or Paris, or London, or Japan, or Singapore… but an entrepreneur sees the world for what it could be, not what it is.
Most people don’t really do too many things because they’re afraid they’ll fail. There are people failing all the time, all around you. And nobody is going to notice your failure. Your failure is not going to be so spectacular that people write news stories about it. Your failure will be boring.
You want to ensure people can do it right 99 percent of time. When we have to fire one of our surgical trainees, it is never because they don’t have the physical skills but because they don’t have the moral skills – to practise and admit failure.
Mental health is an area where people are embarrassed. They don’t want to talk about it because somehow they feel they’re a failure as a parent or, you know, they’re embarrassed for their child or they want to protect their child, lots of very good reasons, but mental health, I feel, is something that you have to talk about.
The main reason for the failure of the modern medical science is that it is dealing with results and not causes. Nothing more than the patching up of those attacked and the burying of those who are slain, without a thought being given to the real strong hold.
The publishing scene in India is evolving rapidly, and the key challenge is to keep reinventing oneself so that one does not become formulaic. Sometimes it is safer to deal with the consequences of failure than the fruits of success. Remaining on one’s toes is critical, and often one finds that success makes one complacent.
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.
The threat posed by Bank of America isn’t just financial – it’s a full-blown assault on the American dream. Where’s the incentive to play fair and do well, when what we see rewarded at the highest levels of society is failure, stupidity, incompetence and meanness? If this is what winning in our system looks like, who doesn’t want to be a loser?
Kids have been let down by adults – we’ve tried to give them too much, we’ve tried not to impose discipline. We’ve tried to make their lives easier and, in doing so, we’ve taken something away from them. Kids like boundaries, they also like to be pushed, need to learn what failure is all about, need guidance.
The greatest challenge to most innovation centers around the world is many nations’ punitive attitudes towards failure. In most of the world, if your first business fails, no one will work with you again. But, trial and error is the genesis of innovation.
Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it’s a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.
Modesty means admitting the possibility of error, subsuming the self for the good of the whole, remaining open to surprise and the gifts that only failure can bring. There are many ways to practice it. Try taking up golf. Or making your own bagels. Or raising a teenager.
One of the things that happens that’s challenging within the democratic process is that people say, ‘Look at this failure, so we should totally change this whole thing.’ And then you add in tons of bureaucratic process and checks and balances, and all of a sudden, it doesn’t work that well.
Ilaiyaraaja is my most favourite music director. His music was my lullaby, his music was my food, his music was my childhood, his music was my first love, his music was my failure, his music was my first kiss, my first love failure, my success… he is in my blood.
The draconian spirit that seeks to enhance penalties and to lower the age at which juveniles will be tries as adults, is part of the ‘whole cloth’ of three strikes. Our failure to address the depair of our inner-city youth is only delayed by our over-confidence in a stance that is ‘tougher than thou.’
Investors do not like losing money. They do not like companies that fail. They do not like entrepreneurs that fail. There is not a culture of celebrating failure in Silicon Valley or anyplace else. That is a myth. Recognize this, and if you start another business, get it to a successful point before approaching outside investors again.
