The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

CHAPTER 7
Failure Is the Way Forward
I really mean it when I say it: I was fortunate.
I graduated college in 2007, 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?