Number of words: 249

I think it fair to say that by any convetional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. The fears that my parents had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew. Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea there was going to be, what the press has since represented as, a fairytale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended… so why do I talk about the benefits of failure?

Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me… I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive.[failure] gave me an inner security that knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

Excerpted from ‘The Economic Naturalist – Why Economics explains almost everything’ by Robert H Frank