Well, that's their problem, isn't it?
Despite our glorification of risk-taking entrepreneurialism, Sandage believes, failure remains "the worst crime an American can commit," and the fear of it makes us perpetually anxious. When he tells his fellow citizens what he's been working on, he says, they tend to giggle nervously. Then they go on to tell family stories.
One came from a woman he met while working on the Rockefeller begging letters. She told him what happened when her father got a Dartmouth College reunion form that asked a series of questions like "Where is your summer house?"
Scott Sandage, the author of "Born Losers," explores America's hangup about failure.
(Bill O'Leary - The Washington Post)
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Her father's career had been solid but unexceptional, Sandage says, "and as he tallied up his life, he shot himself."
Okay, but where does the self-help part come in?
Suppose we buy Sandage's thesis that we've been culturally brainwashed to see life as a psychic dog-eat-dog affair in which just doing okay is never good enough. What does the historian of failure think we're supposed to do about it?
"Awareness is always the first step in any 12-step program," he says. "Admitting that you have a problem is always the first step. Americans think so much about 'Am I succeeding?' and 'How am I going to succeed?' and 'What shall I succeed at?' that we don't very often look failure in the face and say: You can't control me." As a result we lack what sociologist David Riesman called the "nerve of failure," defined as "the courage to face aloneness and the possibility of defeat in one's personal life or one's work without being morally destroyed."
Oh fine. Like that's easy. Thanks, guys.
This kind of courage is especially hard to come up with in a society where the successful entrepreneur is a universal role model and not aiming high enough is considered a mortal sin. Henry David Thoreau, who had the "nerve of failure" in spades, was one of the first to understand this.
"He complained that people called him 'a loafer' for taking daily walks in the woods," Sandage writes. "Yet were he to spend the day as a timber speculator, denuding the landscape, he would be 'esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.' "
Sandage hasn't really written a self-help book, of course. But he does hope it will make readers more aware of how fear of failure can rule their lives.
"You are not what you do," he tells his students. "Your career is rightly part of who you are," especially if you choose work you love. But believing it's the whole enchilada makes failure a deadly thing: "If your achievements implode, there is literally nothing left of you."
Meanwhile, he has a small request for Bill Gates: Please save those begging e-mails, so the tale of 21st-century failure can be told.
