The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success Author: Megan McArdle | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DMCV4GM | Format: EPUB
The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success Description
For readers of Drive, Outliers, and Daring Greatly, a counterintuitive, paradigm-shifting new take on what makes people and companies succeed Most new products fail. So do most small businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure.
McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world’s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work. Drawing on cutting-edge research in science, psychology, economics, and business, and taking insights from turnaround experts, emergency room doctors, venture capitalists, child psychologists, bankruptcy judges, and mountaineers, McArdle argues that America is unique in its willingness to let people and companies fail, but also in its determination to let them pick up after the fall. Failure is how people and businesses learn. So how do you reinvent yourself when you are down?
Dynamic and punchy, McArdle teaches us how to recognize mistakes early to channel setbacks into future success.
The Up Side of Down marks the emergence of an author with her thumb on the pulse whose book just might change the way you lead your life.
- File Size: 764 KB
- Print Length: 321 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 067002614X
- Publisher: Viking Adult (February 11, 2014)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DMCV4GM
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,578 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #11
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Decision-Making & Problem Solving - #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Business Life > Personal Success - #27
in Books > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Decision-Making & Problem Solving
- #11
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Decision-Making & Problem Solving - #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Business Life > Personal Success - #27
in Books > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Decision-Making & Problem Solving
Failure. We've all experienced it. Can we benefit from it? The answer is maybe, depending on the costs of failure.
If the costs of failure are high, e.g., repaying debts for the rest of life, people will avoid taking risks. As a result, society will stagnate, because few take risks.
But if the costs of failure are low, people will take more chances, start more businesses, try experiments that might prove something bold. That is one great thing about America; the penalties for failure are low. Some have said we are the land of unlimited second chances. After resigning from the presidency, Richard Nixon became an influential voice on foreign policy.
Megan McArdle uses her own life and many other societal problems to illustrate how a proper use of failure can benefit individuals and society as a whole. Failure is how we learn. As some have said, "The wise learn from the failures of others, normal people learn from their own failures, but the stupid don't learn."
I enjoyed this book a great deal, but I want to point out a few of the chapters that particularly struck me.
In Chapter 8, she described the various ways that ideologues described the causes of the financial crisis. The Left and the Right chose their own monologues to explain the economic failure that occurred. The truth was far more banal, as average people bought into a housing mania, with financial institutions more than willing to facilitate it, levered as they were. When the bull market ended, many people found themselves with too much debt relative to the value of their houses.
Chapter 9 was the one from which I learned the most, as it described a probation method used in Hawaii, that I would describe as the judicial equivalent of spanking.
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