Chapt 7 EXCERPT - CAPACITY FOR CHANGE: Failure’s A Bitch (pg 177)

When you are successful, you will fail. And let’s not fetishize it, deny it, or try to whitewash it. The ghost of failure haunts me every day. And he doesn’t look anything like the grim reaper. In fact, it’s a she. And she’s hot. I envision her to look like Raquel Welch. She whispers in my ear, she wakes me up at night, she joins me on a morning jog. No matter how high I get, this mistress has her arm around me, seductive, teasing, just waiting for her chance

Because that bitch knows that the forces of gravity are inevitable. What goes up will eventually come down—always—and she’ll be there for me when it does, ready to smack the shit out of me. This is inevitable. So rather than avoid her, prepare for her, accept her, acknowledge her presence like an addict does his addiction

The success-failure yo-yo is an addiction, and it follows the usual addiction cycle , and it’s not one that can be slaked with nicotine patches or nonalcoholic beer. If you’re like me, you’re addicted to wanting to win, to be acknowledged for your ideas, your inventions, and the authentic brand you’ve created. Failure is the necessary hangover of success

This is why there’s no variable for failure in the authenticity formula. No curves. No predictive modeling tells the story properly. And the usual business “failure- to-success” graphs, are wrong to give the illusion of an upward curve. Life doesn’t work that neatly

It’s a given. It’s like carbon or oxygen or water: it’s just something that exists in the universe, and you’ll be done with failure the day you’re done breathing. Accept this as a condition of life, take your next step forward, let the mistress slap you, and then rinse and repeat

TRUMP
Why does Donald Trump almost never talk about his failures? He’s written thirty-seven books, each one about 250 pages, and each page contains about two hundred words, so, roughly, he’s written over 1.8 million words, and almost nowhere in these 1.8 million words does he fail. Okay, so he gives a few quips, like “Sometimes by losing a battle, you will find a new way to win the war,” but where does he really give us the gory details, instead of waxing on about his Ws? Where are the Ls diagnosed? Where are the ugly bits that contain the real pearls? Will someone show me? (There must be more to say about Trump Vodka, Trump Airlines, and President Trump.)