The Downside of The Upside of The Downside

Louis Menand

Summary:

In America, the way people see failure has changed; failure, if sizeable, is not a
pejorative term anymore and can be associated with success and happiness.
Kozmo.com is a good example of how failure can be synonymous of success.
Although this company doe not make money, it is planning on expanding. Failure does
not worry businessmen anymore because employers seem to consider it as a plus; they
seem to prefer someone whose career has had ups and downs rather than ups only. This
failure trend is supported by magazines which reward businessmen for failing such as the
founder of Amazon.com who was named Time magazine’s person of the year. However,
not all failures are equal; failure has to be sizeable to be accepted.
Nevertheless, things are different in school. The “culture of the school” and the
“culture of the marketplace” have opposite views on failure. There is no way failure can
be valued in school whereas in business, failure can be considered as a quality. However,
as for business, failure is better accepted when sizeable. If a student has to fail, he would
rather get an F than a C because his failure would be associated with laziness whereas a C
would imply that he is just not smart enough. In school, the politic of everything or
nothing also seems to exist; an A or an F but nothing in between.
Nowadays, failure has become acceptable as long as it is “extreme”. Failure as
well as success can be synonymous of happiness whereas everything in between is not
worth experiencing.

I think that Louis Menand's article was interesting. Overall, I agree with him. He says
that in business, failure is accepted, I agree with this but I think that failure is acceptable
to a certain extent. I don't think that five failures would look good on a resume so I think
the author should have been more specific about how many failures are acceptable.
Concerning the second part of the article, I partly agree with the author. I agree when he
says that failure in school is not well accepted but personally, I would still prefer getting
a C than an F. I think that this article reflects very well an American society that likes to
go from an extreme to another.

I agree with you when you say that you would rather have a small business that allows
you to live "normally" rather than have a lot and then lose everything. This article did not
talk about this, but I think that a majority of people would prefer the safety of a small
business to the stressful responsibility of having a huge company. Once again, it is about
extremes; the logic of this article tells us that a huge failure or a huge success would
make founders happy but in reality, I think that the “in between” can also make people
happy.