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Freakonomics Radio

169. Failure Is Your Friend

Freakonomics Radio

Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.632K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2014

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In which we argue that failure should not only be tolerated but celebrated.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

So Levit, you're a fairly successful fellow.

0:09.6

Thank you.

0:10.6

I'm just curious, have you succeeded at everything you've ever done?

0:17.0

No, I've mostly failed at everything I've ever done.

0:20.0

Particularly, please.

0:21.2

Well, definitely golf.

0:22.3

Golf has been a lifelong failure.

0:24.2

You know when I was a kid, all I wanted to do was professional golfer.

0:27.7

And thank God that I was so bad at golf, that I couldn't even imagine trying to be a pro

0:33.3

golfer.

0:34.3

I think one of the worst lives you can have in some sense in a modern world is thinking

0:38.2

you're good enough to play pro golf, not being good enough to play pro golf.

0:42.3

Struggling for a decade or 20 years and then you got nothing to show.

0:47.4

But luckily I was so bad I couldn't even pretend to follow that path.

0:52.2

Now you also failed at becoming the kind of economist that you thought you should become

0:56.4

when you first started studying economics, right?

0:58.4

Yeah, I started out as a macro economist wannabe and very quickly I realized that modern

1:04.1

macro was all about solving dynamic optimization models.

1:07.7

So there was hopeless.

1:09.2

Then I wanted to be an economic theorist and I actually, that was more dangerous because

1:13.5

I was closer to golf.

1:15.0

Almost there enough.

...

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