Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

CHAPTER 77
Failure Is the Way Forward
I really mean it when I say it: I was fortunate.
I graduated college in 20077, just in time for the financial collapse and
Great Recession, and attempted to enter the worst job market in more than
eighty years.
Around the same time, I found out that the person who was subletting one
of the rooms in my apartment hadn’t paid any rent for three months. When
confronted about this, she cried and then disappeared, leaving my other
roommate and me to cover everything. Goodbye, savings. I spent the next six
months living on a friend’s couch, stringing together odd jobs and trying to
stay in as little debt as possible while looking for a “real job.”
I say I was fortunate because I entered the adult world already a failure. I
started out at rock bottom. That’s basically everybody’s biggest fear later on
in life, when confronted with starting a new business or changing careers or
quitting an awful job, and I got to experience it right out of the gates. Things
could only get better.
So yeah, lucky. When you’re sleeping on a smelly futon and have to count
coins to figure out whether you can afford McDonald’s this week and you’ve
sent out twenty résumés without hearing a single word back, then starting a
blog and a stupid Internet business doesn’t sound like such a scary idea. If
every project I started failed, if every post I wrote went unread, I’d only be
back exactly where I started. So why not try?
Failure itself is a relative concept. If my metric had been to become an
anarcho-communist revolutionary, then my complete failure to make any
money between 20077 and 2008 would have been a raving success. But if,
like most people, my metric had been to simply find a first serious job that
could pay some bills right out of school, I was a dismal failure.