[Newspoetry] failure

[DL Emerick]

Failure.  How do you define it?  This is not a question susceptible of inversions.  Nope.  No one can define success, not concretely, either.  It's always a matter of some difference, I suppose, between expectations and performances.

That's how some companies define it, on employee evaluation sheets.  "What did we expect you to do in the last period?  And, what was it you actually accomplished?"  Failure and success here are some sleight of hand, some arithmetic of perception -- for expectations are slippery and fluid, accomplishments can be evanescent.

Oh, we pretend it is all objective, but it's mostly a matter of a judgment formed from perceptions, dominated by attitudes, when it comes to the viewe of some other person.

Yet, the difference stands out: subtract expectations from performances.  If the difference is nothing, then you are a typical blue collar guy --- nothing much different than the next blue collar guy.  Smart workers know this fact keenly.  They work at setting up expectations so that their performances will always be higher.  Dumb workers fail even to understand what the game is about.  The blue collar guys give just enough effort to make nothing -- and they have a fun time of it.

True blue collar guys can walk away from their work.  There's nothing in it for them, anyway.  They are working because they have to pay bills, but they have no dreams, no hopes, no idea of anything except pleasing themselves, especially after the work day is over.  Because blue collar guys never do any thing resembling thinking, its planning and projecting, not on how to survive, but how to get ahead, how to advance in the ranks.

Failure is easy enough to see, in the eyes of the smart workers.  Failure is even easier for philosophers to see.  Old Socrates would regale his students, asking them whether they thought that a dead guy's success in life, by its reputation, was fixed at the moment of his death.  Well, there is this tiny problem that opinions shift, sometimes dramtically, about dead guys -- sometimes the despised become heroes (and vice versa), as the world's evaluation processes and normative bases undergo revision.

Nonetheless, it is all about standards: which expectations and what performances define the ubiquitous difference?

The internal answer is perhaps the only sensible one by which to live a life.  Success means accomplishing your ambitions, failure means some shortcomings -- and disaster means irreversible failures, ambitions that have no chance to succeed because their possibility has been destroyed.

So it goes, so it goes.