Failure is a Good Thing by Jon Carroll

Success is boring. Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do… Failure is how we learn.

The first time I played pool, I won. I explained to my friends that it's because I have an innate understanding of physics. I'm a spatial thinker. Alas. I never won again.

When my little sister was born, they gave her a bunch of tests as they do all babies. She came out low in one, and although I was 4 at the time, I remembered this. I had been a perfect baby. She, despite taking all the attention away from me, was not. As soon as she was old enough to understand, I explained this to her: she is an inferior person; in order to keep up with everyone else, she would have to work a lot harder.

So, here's the funny part: she did (work a lot harder). She's done everything I've done, but better. She's multilingual; I am not. My Master's is from Berkeley; her's Harvard. I went to a small liberal arts college in New England; she went to a better one. I've traveled around the world; she's been to 5 countries in the last 3 weeks. I chose a profession to help people (transportation planning); so did she (international education policy). Despite this paragraph, we aren't competitive. She cares more, works harder than I do, and I respect her for that.

Because of what I told her about herself (which was false, by the way) she expected to fail at first, to have to try harder. Based on my 4-year-old understanding of these tests, I always thought everything would come to me easily, because I was a perfect baby. So, Maybe I'm afraid to fail, afraid to try too hard in case I did fail. I believe that this particular form of sibling torture did her a huge favor.

I don't really have a point other than that, if we would all just embrace failure, maybe we'd all be a lot happier and more successful.