Joshua Wolf Shenk Quote
At the same time that self-made entered the nation’s lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode—I made a failure, a merchant would say after losing his shop—failure in antebellum America became a matter of identity, describing not an event but a person. As the historian Scott Sandage explains in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, the phrase I feel like a failure comes to us so naturally today that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul. It became conventional wisdom in the early nineteenth century, Sandage explains, that people who failed had a problem native to their constitution. They weren’t just losers; they were born losers.
At the same time that self-made entered the nation’s lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode—I made a failure, a merchant would say after losing his shop—failure in antebellum America became a matter of identity, describing not an event but a person. As the historian Scott Sandage explains in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, the phrase I feel like a failure comes to us so naturally today that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul. It became conventional wisdom in the early nineteenth century, Sandage explains, that people who failed had a problem native to their constitution. They weren’t just losers; they were born losers.