No success like failure

No success like failure Last night author and therapist Susie Orbach led a discussion at our local Starbucks on “how to cope with risk and failure in a society hooked on success”. Delighted to discover that where society sees failure, Orbach too more often sees strategies of accommodation.

She knows there’s no success like failure
and that failure’s no success at all.

I liked too her endorsement of the value of seeing the extent to which we are each the product of specific circumstances, not simply the free and potentially omnipotent spirits our culture celebrates. Orbach is a founder of Antidote.

The event was part of the Coffeehouse Challenge programme of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which aims to once again see coffeehouses everywhere filled with invigorating debate on issues of local concern.

Did we do that? Despite a challenging start from Orbach, there was much rehearsing of familiar conversations — how driven many successful people are; money isn’t everything — and never broke out of orbit around the principal speaker. More tellingly, we geniuses neglected to identify actions to address whatever we thought the problem was. But I did get to see that my own concerns centre on the extent to which people express or suppress their playfulness.