Born Losers

"This is an historical account of changing attitudes towards failure. Sandage takes American culture as his focus, although I think his insights apply far beyond that. The idea of being “willing to fail” gets bandied about a lot these days, mostly by annoying celebrity entrepreneurs who say that “the only way to succeed is to be willing to fail”. I think that’s true, but it goes a lot deeper than how they mean it. And of course we only ever hear from the ones who end up succeeding – and they would say that. Sandage goes back through history to look at changing ideas of what failure means. He argues that, prior to the emergence of consumer capitalism, people themselves were rarely referred to as failures. Their individual projects might fail, but you didn’t write someone off as a failure just because their expedition or their business venture failed. There are lots of different reasons, but Sandage’s economic reading is that the system of consumer credit and loans needed to categorise people in a more all-round way as good or bad risks. He suggests that the growth of credit ratings agencies was central in starting to define people as successes or failures. There’s a strong argument that part of the difficulty we have with confronting and experiencing failure is the idea that it’s global and final – that it defines a person entirely. The psychologist Carol Dweck has shown that if you treat failure as feedback – evidence that you’re pushing against your present limits – you’ll be much better off."