The Art of Failing Upward
“It is the ‘failure-deprived Stanford and Harvard students’ as Ms. Lahey’s book calls them – who are best equipped to fail successfully. For these elites, failure becomes not so much a crisis as a modern-day finishing school, where everyone graduates with the perfect resume of mettle-building career challenges.”
“We have one group who’s being told ‘Don’t take a challenging subject like physics so that you can get your credential’ and we have another group that’s being told ‘Drop out of college and just mess things up and it’ll be fine,’ he added. If you ‘fail fast’ and don’t have the right demographics, the right safety net, you just fail.”
What is most interesting is the American obsession with success and failure. It always strikes me how our international students do not see the world through the black and white American vision of winners and losers. More to follow…