The next person who says, "Failure is the same thing as opportunity" is going to get punched in the teeth.

It is condescending platitudes like this that mock True Failure, mistaking True Failure for hardship, and hardship for setback.

True Failure is rare and it cannot be accomplished in one swift move. True Failure takes a good chunk of one's lifetime to achieve, and is never measured by set goals and acheivement, but by potential and actuality.

The next person who says, "the only failure is a man who has stopped trying" is going to receive an elbow to the kidney. True Failure precludes further effort. If there was any way that trying a little bit more could bring success, well then we wouldn't call it Failure, would we?

True Failure, as I said, has nothing to do with external goals. True Failure has to do with the innate potential that a person is born into. This is not to say that everyone is born with equal potential, but everyone is born with some.

The problem here is that while people encounter little "failures" throughout the courses of their lives, it is difficult to know when you have hit True Failure. There are lots of reasons for this, the most important being that we know our lives will extend into the future, but we don't know how much future we have. As long as the definition of Failure presupposes some taking of stock of one's life as a totality, it will necessarily be difficult to judge.

But not impossible. To judge your life as a totality, just imagine that you have no future, and as someone with no future, ask yourself this: what did you do with your life?

The next person who tells me I shouldn't be afraid to fail is going to get kicked in the brain. Failure should be feared more than anything else; indeed, Failure is the only thing there is to fear. Remember that scene in Papillon, where Steve McQueen encounters God or some other judge and is condemded for committing the greatest crime there is? Do you remember what that crime was?

It was a wasted life.

We coddle each other with maxims like "don't be afraid to fail." There was a poster in my high school which read, "Shoot for the moon, because even if you fail, you'll end up among the stars." Other than lacking even a rudimentary understanding of astonomy, the real message here is that it's acceptable to settle. So we end up settling time after time: "Gee, I wanted to get a good job, but I failed and got a shitty job, but that's OK because failure is the same thing as opportunity. Do you want fries with that?" Do this a couple of times and you are just encountering minor setbacks, mere "failures." Make a lifestyle out of a series of "failures" and you become A Failure.