The Body Blog

Failure is awesome. Failure teaches. A short story to illustrate: Once upon a time, I had a real job. A suit-and-tie, office-with-windows, nine-to-five, ostentatiously-titled job at a PR firm. I was sitting in the boss’s office with he and another employee going over some Q&A we’d prepared for a client, and, while reading the copy aloud, ran across the word philanthropic. The boss was reading, and he pronounced the word phil-an-THROP-ic, with the stress on the third syllable. I interjected, “You mean phil-AN-thro-pic.”, (stress on the second syllable) in my I’m-so-clever-and-young-and-sure-of-myself, puffy kind of way. My cocksure word-vomit was returned with paralyzing stares from both pairs of eyes. The next two minutes were spent educating me on the proper pronunciation and use of the word phil-an-THROP-ic. I don’t embarrass easily, that was the exception in recent memory. Point is, I will never forget the proper pronunciation of philanthropic. My capital failure resulted in the correct pronunciation of a word being stitched onto the fleshy mush of my brain. Embrace failure of all kinds. Love it. Learn from it.