Losing Is the New Winning

By Liza Mundy

Now is the time for all good men to fail. Good women,too. Fail early and often, and don’t be shy about admitting it. Failing isn’t shameful; it’s not even failure. Such is the message of a growing body of self-help and leadership literature. “Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them?” asks the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, in which she argues that a willingness to court failure can be a precursor to growth.1. deficiency: 缺点，缺陷；court: 企图获得，追求；precursor: 前兆，先兆。Dweck holds, persuasively, that successful people are not the ones who cultivate a veneer of perfection,2. persuasively: 令人信服地，有说服力地；cultivate: 培养，发展；veneer: 虚饰，粉饰。but rather those who understand that failing is part of getting smarter and better.

The same point is made in Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly (a best seller that borrows its title from Theodore Roosevelt’s exhortation that when you fail, the important thing is to do it while “daring greatly”); Tim Harford’s Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure; Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error; and Brilliant Blunders, Mario Livio’s tour of “colossal”scientific mistakes that led to breakthroughs.3. 同样的观点你可以在以下这些书中找到：布琳·布朗的《勇敢示弱》（这本畅销书的书名取自西奥多·罗斯福总统的劝诫——当你失败时最重要的是要“勇敢示弱”）；蒂姆·哈福德的《适应：为何成功总是始于失败》；凯瑟琳·舒尔茨的《我们为什么会犯错？》；以及马里奥·李维奥的《杰出的失误》，介绍了那些重大的科学失误所导致的突破性成就。exhortation: 劝诫性的讲话，告诫；colossal: 巨大的，其大无比的。

In the spring of 2014, Sarah Lewis’s forthcoming book, The Rise: Creativity, Mastery, and the Gift of Failure, will reflect on“flops, folds, setbacks, wipeouts and hiccups,” and the “dynamism” they inspire.4The failure fetish5. fetish: 过分的迷恋，崇拜。is even finding its way into modern parenting. Reacting against the tendency to cushion children with coaches and tutors, authors like Po Bronson, Paul Tough,and Wendy Mogel argue that we need to allow our children to fail, because struggle builds resilience and grit.6. cushion: v. 缓和……的冲击（或影响）；resilience:（病后或遭受挫折或不幸的）复原能力，适应能力；grit: 勇气，坚毅。Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, the ability to speak perceptively and candidly about one’s past failures has practically become a job qualification.7. 与此同时，在硅谷，能够感同身受且直言不讳地表达自己过去的失败经历几乎已成为获得一份工作的先决条件。perceptively:（因共鸣而）理解地，深切地； candidly: 坦率地，直言不讳地。A prospective employee (or an applicant for venturecapital funding) who has survived a failed start-up is someone who has learned valuable lessons from someone else’s failure.8. prospective: 有希望的，可期待的；venture-capital:【商】风险投资；start-up: 新公司，新开张的企业。

与以往鼓吹的“成功要趁早”的论调不同，现在有一种“失败文化”——以一种更为智慧的谦逊姿态出现——正在悄然升温。那些胸怀抱负的人惨遭失败继而又重振旗鼓的故事，似乎听起来比那些一帆风顺的故事更要引人入胜。与此同时，深谙民众这一心理的政客们也开始因此大打“悲情牌”。这是不是说明“失败”已从一个避之不及的“烫手山芋”变成了人们趋之若鹜的“香饽饽”呢？

Given this growing cultural fixation on failure, it was probably inevitable that politicians would begin clambering aboard the pro-failure bandwagon.9. 鉴于这种与日俱增的对于“失败”文化的偏好， 政客们很可能也会不可避免地加入到“支持失败”的浪潮中去。fixation:【心】固着，不正常的依恋（或偏爱）；inevitable: 不可避免的，无法规避的；clamber aboard the bandwagon: 〈口〉赶浪头。

This idea is not entirely new. As the historian Robert Dallek pointed out to me, overcoming failure—bankruptcy, addiction, dissolution,defeat—is part of the quintessential American success story.10. addiction: 上瘾，沉溺；dissolution: 终止，瓦解；defeat: 失败，挫折；quintessential: 精髓的，典型的。Failure narratives resonate with all sorts of deeply held cultural tenets,from Christianity’s focus on forgiveness and rebirth to the frontier mentality’s emphasison prevailing over obstacles both external and internal,including our own imperfect selves.11. resonate with: 与……共鸣；tenet: 原则，信条；frontier mentality: 拓荒心态，边疆心态论；prevail over: 获胜，占上风；obstacle:障碍，阻碍。

In real life, of course, failure is sometimes just that:failure. Truth is, the current catalogue of pro-failure literature does not celebrate failure in all forms. We like failure when, and only when, it ends in victory. “Lots of people never achieve their goals; they do not achieve their dreams, even though they have worked really hard and prepared themselves,” points out Scott Sandage,a historian and the author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. “To believe that failure is only a valuable lesson if it leads eventually to triumph really isn’t embracing12. embrace: 欣然接受。failure at all. It’s crossing your fingers13. cross one’s fingers: （把食指与中指交叉）祈求走运（或成功）。behind your back that eventually you’re going to succeed.” Victory and loss are often beyond our control,whatever we might like to think about our ability to triumph over circumstance.

And yet we like what we like for a reason. Other people’s failures, served up with the right ratio of struggle to eventual redemption, are interesting to watch.14. ratio: 比例，比率；redemption: 挽救，改造。Failure and recovery make for a grand narrative, transforming an ordinary person or politician into something more like a literary character. Like odysseys and coming-of-age stories and parables of exile, failure gives a life or a career a pleasing dramatic arc.15. 正如历经沧桑的流浪故事、成长小说以及背井离乡的寓言中所描写的那样，失败为生活或事业画上了一条令人愉悦且充满戏剧性的弧线。odyssey:（历尽沧桑的）长期流浪，智力（或精神）上的长期探索过程；parable: （说教性的）寓言。Bill Clinton’s failures and flaws, along with his political genius, are part of what make him one of the most compelling public figures of our time.

Success is supposed to come after failure, not before.When the reverse happens—when spectacular success is followed by failure or even just fumbling—the central character seems diminished rather than enlarged,optimism feels harder to come by, and the story just doesn’t have that stirring sense of downfall and digging-out that we seem, irresistibly, to want.16.（理应先经历失败之后再成功，而不是相反。）当相反的情况发生时——当引人注目的巨大成功之后，随之而来的是失败，甚至只是一时的失误时——中心人物的地位被削弱而不是加强，因此乐观态度更加难以获得了，而这类故事也就不再具有我们似乎是不可避免地想要的那种跌宕情节和深度探索所带来的鼓舞人心的感觉。reverse: 相反的，反向的；fumbling: 失误；stirring: 激动（或鼓舞）人心的，感动人心的；downfall:垮台，衰落；irresistibly: 不可抵抗地。