Some time ago, a teacher in Britain started a campaign to have the word 'failed' banished from schools; she felt that little Johnny and young Jill would be scarred for life having been told that they were not the brightest crayons in the box. In her view, apparently, seeing the word 'failed' would imply to the two that they were about as bright as damp sparkplugs. It's utter rubbish, and sets the kids up for a very hard fall in the world they will encounter after school, where failure means you don't get the contract, you lose your job, you don't meet your sales budget. The teacher's suggested alternative for 'failed' was 'deferred success'. On that basis, I know people who have been deferring success since they were born. It's nonsense, of course, and had such ideas been policy back in 1939 in Britain, we'd all be speaking German now. I rather go for the approach favoured by Vince Lombardi... "It is time for us to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever, the one who recognizes the challenge and does something about it." And it's clear that our teacher's idea is about as bright as an Eskom-powered lightbulb, and about as useful. We regularly feature items on awards (winning people, wines, foods, what-have-you), and that's great, because it is through achieving that we attain a sense of worth. And if we at first we fail, and then try again, and succeed, that feeling of worth is enhanced. Edison was asked how he felt about 50,000 failed attempts to develop a lightbulb and his answer was along the lines of "I didn't have 50,000 failures - I discovered 50,000 ways in which a lightbulb cannot work." Here endeth the lesson...

Rod Baker, Content Manager