Shameless Plug for My Favorite Book #3 - On Failure
When (not if) you fail, you are in good company - Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellers, Jack Benny, Wile E. Coyote, Sylvester the Cat, Elmer Fudd, and (my favorite) Daffy Duck are loved precisely for the universality of their failures. Failure is the most human and humanizing of experiences.
“Father loved his children but hated having a family. He became belatedly aware one dismal rain-struck morning of the painful reality of his fatherhood: that he was up to his hips in children, and unless he wanted to blame those selfsame hips which were, after all, responsible, he must do something to rectify matters. In short, get out.
Now, all that remained for him was the technical difficulty of how to do so. We were far from a wealthy family. Indeed, a history of Father’s fiscal meanderings would make a valuable contribution to the “What to Avoid” chapter of any “How to Succeed” textbook. In short, he didn’t have enough bread to supply bread for his family for the next 12 to 15 years, much less provide all the gear, from garter belts to saddle shoes, necessary to see the self-respecting child through high school and perhaps, college.
The only solution seemed to be to strike it rich. Then he could run for the hills, secure in the knowledge that his family was fiscally secure…
Opportunities for immediate wealth were a dime a dozen [in 1920’s California] - and worth approximately that. Father tried them all, plus some introductory ideas of his own: he formed companies that attempted to sell avocados when people called them Alligator Pears and thought of them as either poisonous or Communistic, or both; he offered vineyards for sale when Prohibition was in full astringent swing; he took a short option on a place called Signal Hill and tried frustratingly to grow geraniums there for the Eastern market, only to discover that his floral non-fecundity was caused by crude oil saturating the soil. Where flowers should have blossomed, crude-oil rigs sprouted instead, long after Father’s geraniums and options had withered away.”
