ExcerptHow to Succeed with Failure When All Else FailsIt was only after John James Audubon’s business failed in 1819 that he began traveling and painting birds. George Frederick Handel unleashed his creative genius after a night of deep despair over his failure as a musician (he lived in poverty and had suffered a stroke). The world landscape is strewn with such stories of success rising from the ashes of failure. Yet failure tends to strike fear in our hearts like nothing else. There is so little tolerance for it in our culture and tremendous pressure to get it right every time, to be in control, to succeed and win.... What would it be like to cast failure in a different light, to take it out of the darkness of disgrace and guilt, to remove the feeling of “disaster” associated with failure, to look for what it tells us about our well-being and our conduct in life? What enormous amounts of energy would be freed up? And for what?... Open Door to a New Success
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