Julian
Baggini on Bertrand Russell:
"If we look to the full completion of goals
and ambitions as the mark of success, Russell’s life was a heroic failure. But
if achievement means living a life according to your passions and values,
Russell’s life was a glorious success.
Howard Jacobson:
"...But you have to see failure as an opportunity. I took the
route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success. That
might be an inflated way of putting it, but failures are nothing if not
grandiose. If the world doesn't value us, we won't value the world. We
seek solace in books, in solitary and sometimes fantastical thinking, in
doing with words what boys who please their fathers do with balls. We look down
on what our fellows like, and make a point of liking what our fellows
don't. We become special by virtue of not being special enough. I doubt many
writers were made any other way..."
Will Self:
"...No, this is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there
any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this – nor do I think
it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously
"creative". On the contrary, it often occurs to me that since what
successes I do manage are both experienced and felt entirely in solitude, there
must be many others who are the same as me: people for whom life is a process
to be experienced, not an object to be coveted. There may be, as Bob Dylan says,
no success like failure, but far from failure being no success at all, in its
very visceral intensity, it is perhaps the only success there is..."
In WSJ dated July 19 2024, I saw an article titled "This Silicon Valley Investor Is Building a Shrine to Failure":
"As a venture capitalist based in the heart of Silicon
Valley, Sean Jacobsohn is in the business of hunting for success. And he
recently did something that would have sounded completely nuts almost anywhere
else on the planet.
He decided to build his own personal monument to failure...
...Jacobsohn believes there is a lesson to be drawn from every
regrettable object in his collection. As he built the Failure Museum, he began
to think more about the causes of business failures, and he developed his own
framework to understand why most startups go belly-up. He calls his theory the
Six Forces of Failure.
The list: bad product-market fit, shaky finances, ignoring
customer feedback, tough competition, poor timing and people—pushover boards,
ineffective management, founders who are frauds.
His main takeaway is that failure is an integral, too easily
ignored element of success. Anyone who wants to get something right should be
aware of the many ways that it could go really, really wrong.
In the tech capital of the world, someone who hasn’t failed
probably hasn’t been very successful. As it happens, there is no place more
appropriate for a shrine to failure than Silicon Valley, which not only accepts
but almost encourages it. When he looks at startup founders who have never
tasted failure, Jacobsohn sees entrepreneurs who have never taken meaningful
risks..."
Mattel doll Allan, NOT Barbie or Ken
