“When I’m managing creative people, the way they relate to failure is very important. Because there are certain types of failure that you really want to celebrate. I personally learned a lot more from my failures than from my successes. And if you look at it that way, then all my failures, you know, in some sense brought me to my larger successes, because I recognized why I failed, and I learned from it. And so, at that point, you can even argue that it’s not a failure. It’s part of your learning process.”

Read the whole interview here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/business/14corner.html?pagewanted=all

Epic has only one meaning to me.

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EPIC FAILs are joked about constantly, while epic failures are not: the former is ironic hyperbole, the latter is serious, just like you say.

I’m trying to be descriptive here, while you seem to be prescriptive. I’m using the immediate language of the day in an attempt to illustrate a deeper point, while you to seem to be using examples most 18-year-olds today have not read to make the point that failure of epic proportions isn’t funny.

Lest I be mistaken, when I say EPIC Fail I mean, on its face, minor failure that is embarrassing but merely a psychological barrier to further success, and in its connotation herein, “grand experiment.”

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Epic failures are nothing to joke about, or fool people ’bout, imho.

P.S. Orlando Furioso is the same as Orlando Innamorato, which I did not read. Ariosto’s work presages, and predates, J.R.R. Tolkein by many hundreds of years.

My purpose here is not to explain any reasons to go to college, rather to add an unexpected objective, that of experimentation.

In the very last line I instruct the reader to substitute the verb “fail” with “experiment.” It’s a twist, like the wedding ring at the end of Sixth Sense, or the true meaning of the Nacirema tribe. I want the reader to spend a moment in suspended disbelief pondering why failure might be a good thing, and then to see that what I really mean is for the reader to embrace “the process,” which when applied at risk of failure often enough, leads to both failures and hopefully greater successes.

In the penultimate sentence, by using FTW and EPIC FAIL, I mean to invoke both the parlance and hyperbole of teh internets; I see an EPIC FAIL often notably epic not for the damage to life and limb but for the public embarrassment it brings in its revelation. That is, ye shall live to tell the tale and learn from it.

Translation: go to a safe place (like college), experiment, enjoy the process even when your hypotheses fail, and be better for the experiences.

Have you really explained _why_ a person should go to college?

It’s all about deferred gratification. Everyone wants to start their life. A certain amount of waiting is best, though.

And I’d say a person has a body which might be in shape, intelligence to learn what is true, and wisdom to decide what to do.

But the body is almost trivial to change, and wisdom is best rooted in lots of truth, and the mind is far better suited to learn things when young… and that all adds up to “spend as much of your youth as you can bear learning.”

As for embracing failure, that sounds wrong, too. Don’t think you are a failure because you sometimes fail. None of us will always succeed. But “embracing failure” makes failure sounds like it is a good thing (hint: don’t embrace bad things, especially true in the most literal sense). Not to mention that Saul Bellow, the only major neo-conservative literary figure, embraces failure.

By the way, as a extreme leftist, I think people do themselves a disservice by totally ignoring the neo-cons. The introduction of Leo Strauss’s “The City and Man” really opened my eyes. Just because most of the rest of the founder of neo-conservatism’s opus is hateful, obscurantized evil doesn’t mean it all is. (obligatory: Hitler had the Volkswagen beetle invented, and Stalin was big into language group autonomy (which is my thing, but who knows who else’s)).

Cheers!