Failure Through Excellence

Failure Through Excellence:
Sixteen Reasons to Make Failure Your Goal

1. Because until you attain success, the goal of success is a temptation to discontentment.

2. Because you will be disillusioned when you discover that your success, which appeared majestic from below, is just one more dot on the map of infinity.

3. Because when success is the end you have in mind, everything else becomes a means to that end, so that all talk of love and goodness is just empty rhetoric.

4. Because human nature can not pursue success without turning it into a kind of self-important rivalry.

5. Because when you are successful at something, anyone who desires success in that same something will seek to destroy something.

6. Because success is not even possible. There is always - always - another horizon, another objective, something else to prove.

7. Because every human excellence is forged within the struggle itself, not in attaining the goal.

8. Because there is nothing more fickle than human praise, and nothing more silly than self-congratulation.

9. Because if success is your goal, you will ignore the dozens of better reasons to do your best.

10. Because the goals you choose for yourself are just arbitrary notions in a sea of shifting possibilities.

11. Because your truest calling can never be truly defined my words and ideas related to the concept of success.

12. Because if your goal is sufficiently noble, you can not possibly reach it.

13. Because the path to any worthy goal is paved with innumerable failures.

14. Because contentment in being average, or slightly below average, allows at least the possibility of relaxed gratitude for the good that is already present.

15. Because every true, great success is acheived by pursuing something other than success.

16. Because of everything I have not stated here that is explained by Tennessee Williams in his essay, "The Catastrophe of Success."