As you watch TV or gaze up the corporate ladder, everyone but you seems accomplished and successful. How sweet it is ,then, to realize that failure is what life is all about; failure is why you're here. Isnt there more nobility in your failed attempt to sonquer youself, or to relieve the solitude of the one youlove, or to just continue living this difficult life in the face of oncoming death than there is in the greatest success of any banker, brain surgeon, or late-night aerobics instructor? You can ultimately succed only at unimportant things. The lofiest things in life always end in failure. So the next time you're suffering from low self-esteem, remember this: every beautiful, rish, sucesssful person you see on TV will, like you, fail at what matters to them most> If you seek something worthwhile, seek failure.



There are times in life when you're lost and no job or career path feels right. you're doing something, but you're doing it half-heartedly. When you find yourself drifing and slacking like this, remember: you doint have to know what you're doing, you just have to do it as hard as you possibly can. It's only when you dosoemthing with all your heart that you find out what it is you're really doing. When everything feels kind of wrong, you have to shcoose one wrong thing and work really hard at it. This will help you see your way clear to the next wrong thing, and the next, until you reach some right thing-- if you ever do. Odviouly, working hard at the worng thing may result in irritability, depression, emecclement, or industrial sabotage. But this is a small price to pay for finding your true life's work.



When you are unhappy, you find yourself prone to feelings of envy and jealousy. When your own life seems worthless, you often look at someone else's life and want it for yourself. But remember, however much you might want his car, career, lover, or even good looks or intelligence, you would never, given the chance, choose to be that person. You would never shoose to exchange sould, because your ego is firecely dound to your defects and failings no matter how appalling they may be. Once you realize this--once you relize that no matter how worthless your life is, it's still the only one you would ever choose to have.


On the interstate of life you rarely reach your destination. In rest stop after rest stop, you look for sings of God, or happiness, or just reason enough to get back on the road. But is it not tight and fitting that you lost your way? Isn't such failure itself evidence of the sublime?Granted, the bleary-eyed, caffeine-dazed monotony of the interstate of life may often feel like an endless bad dream. But the roadiside wreckage that marks your journey--the discarded quarts of oil, the busted hubcaps, the insect bodies splattered on your windshield, the coffe lids scattered at your feet--arent these signs that, in a certain way, you have already arrived?



Meaningful personal growth rarely occurs without anguish, crisis, and loss. Maybe you're in a dead-end relationship or have't come out to your parents. Or maybe you've got a secure job but always wanted to make it on your own. You need to change your life. But you're not going to make a move until things get a lot worse. In such a state, the only way forward is deeper into crisis. Pushing yourself deliberately into crisis is never easy. After all, it's only natural to resist permanent damage to your identity. Buy if you can bludgeon your resistance into submission, you can reach the point of no return. Past this point, you are fully committed to the crisis. With no way back, your once-idle doubts and speclations must crystallize into desperate convictins. With your consciousness polarized into a brawl of warring factions, your choices will at last lie clearly and unforgivingly before you.