This morning I woke up and checked my email.

In it was an email from my friend David Cohen entitled “Wow.” Normally, I just delete David’s emails because they are boring nonsense about Techstars, or yet another expression of adulation, but the single word subject made me curious.

David, not the most eloquent person in the world, wrote:

Micah, yet again today you have given me hope in this country’s future. Single-handedly, you provide me inspiration to one day achieve the level of brilliance you have. It is probably no surprise, but I was absolutely floored by your BigOmaha video.

Ok, maybe I paraphrased a bit. (Well, except for the subject. It really did say “Wow,” and in the email, near the bottom, there was a small reference to “some video” he had heard I did.)

David, as he often does, simplified what I was trying to say in my 40 minute long presentation about Failure being a process rather than a destination in a great post which I read this morning. “Micro failures,” great term.

Then as I perused my Twitter stream, parsing out all the wonderful tweets about my awesomeness (like this one, from my friend Rick Turoczy, who writes the SiliconForist blog in Portland, Oregon: “@micah, you moron, I cant believe Twitter hasnt banned you yet for your stupidity.”), I came across a link to a post that Bijan wrote, The Upside of Rejection.

In the post, Bijan recounts his attempts to land a job at a big firm in Boston, and how failing to do so lead him to a life-changing occupation and, eventually, his wife.

Which gets me to what I am writing about. 270 words later. Yeah, I am succinct like that.

When I was a senior in high school, (Independence High School in San Jose, what what!) IBM offered an internship to one person in our district (which was no small district at the time, probably covering 20-30,000 kids I would guess). It was an impressive summer internship. $300 a week, a guaranteed job every summer in between college, ability to work at multiple departments within IBM, and so on.

I applied, certain that I wouldnt get it. I was, by no means, the best student around, never really did a bunch of extracurriculars, nor did I have stellar references. Instead, I resigned myself to being a lifeguard at the local pool, a job I had held throughout high school. Which of course, also meant smoking a ton of weed. (I was in high school, what activity didnt justify smoking a ton of weed? Shoot, at the time, breathing justified smoking a ton of weed.)

Well, I suppose you can see where this is going, and I wasnt selected for the internship.

Initially.

Then I was. Turns out the first person got dropped for some reason, and they were offering it to me. Except there was one caveat. As a requirement of employment, I would have to take a drug test.

This was not good (If, I have lost you, please refer back to the section about smoking a ton of weed, or perhaps you should think about putting the joint down).

I passed on the position, and returned to lifeguarding and smoking a ton of weed.

Often, I think about how my life would be different if I had done the responsible thing and taken the internship (and stopped smoking a ton of weed). Would I have ended up at a hot startup in the Silicon Valley? Would I be a drone at IBM?

Thats the thing about failure (and trust me, deciding to smoke weed over working at IBM is a colossal failure), its ephemeral and there is no promise as to what happens next. Am I proud of my decision? Of course not. But, I also dont look back at that time as the seminal moment in my life. It was a choice I made. It was a path I took. It was really not that big of a deal (except to my mother who is now reading why I never took the job at IBM. I may no longer be welcome in her home).

Which is what both David and Bijan’s posts are about, and even Jason’s BigOmaha talk and post.

It is ok to fail. It is ok to fail often. Its just not ok to focus on failure or accept failure.

Focus on success; let failure come along for the ride. (but give him a seat in the back by the screaming kid.)

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