By the time Steve Jobs's Wikipedia page had been adjusted to past tense, eulogists had added a footnote to his biography of success and that's failure, says Kathleen Parker in her column with the Washington Post on Sunday, writing about the subject of success and failure. Excerpt: Jobs, though wildly successful, also failed often and badly. Therein, we note, lies perhaps the larger lesson of his life: Sometimes you have to fail to succeed. Jobs was fired by the company he co-founded. Yet it was during this period of exile that he picked up a little computer graphics company later called Pixar Animation Studios, the sale of which made him a billionaire. Jobs himself recognized his failures in a now-famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. He recalled sleeping on the floors of friends' dorm rooms and walking seven miles to a Hare Krishna temple for his one good meal of the week. Fear of failure isn't only an adult concern. From an early age, we are plagued with anxiety about performance. This seems a natural-enough evolutionary development. The strong and savvy survive - and get a girl. The less accomplished eat scraps and enjoy the company of human leftovers. “Losers,” we call them. A history of human failure would make for a long and interesting read, yet we prefer books about success. We thrill at the end-zone victory dance, applaud the extra point, admire the perfect 10. An entire lexicon of cliches has evolved around the idea of failure and recovery. It's not the thing attained that matters; it's the journey that gives us life. The act of creation — the struggle — far exceeds the pleasure of the thing created. Recent acknowledgment of the power of failure, inspired by Jobs's too-soon demise, provides a welcome spiritual uplift for stressed-out adults. But we're missing an even more important morality tale that has profound consequences for our nation's future. Our obsession with success and our fear of failure has trickled down to ever-younger humans, our children, at great cost not only to their psychological well-being but also, ultimately, to our ability to compete in the global marketplace. In another famous commencement address, J.K. Rowling's to Harvard in 2008, the “Harry Potter” author eulogized her own valuable failures. “Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations,” she said. “Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.” In a culture where failure is not well-understood as necessary to growth — and accomplishment is diminished by a code of equal outcomes that enshrines entitlement — then no one gets wiser or better. And a nation populated by such people may not survive. __
