Thursday, May 15, 2008

A Formula for Failure

I coudnt help but take a snippet out of Paul Ormerod's latest book Why Most Things Fail and use it in this post. He quotes P.J. O'Rourke from this book Eat the Rich : "One thing that economists do know is that the study of economics is divided into two fields, "microeconomics" and "macroeconomics". Micro is the study of individual behaviour and macro is the study of how economies behave as a whole. That is, microeconomics concerns things that economists are specifically wrong about , while macroeconomics concerns things economists are wrong generally". (Don't mention this at the LSE, you would get slapped)

That led me to thinking deeply (:D) about failure. Failure is all around us! Government policies fail (almost always), markets have failed, predictions fail, businesses fail...even Newtons laws have failed (refer theory of relativity and the space time fabric in case you doubt me). My first class at LSE was about failures. My first assignment that followed the lecture was about investigating IS failures( IS according to Ian, is always a failure. so that wasn't a tough task). My attempts at flirting has been a failure (always), and my attempts at failing have also failed miserably(no its true, I had decided to fail one of my exams in the 3rd Semester of my engg...the subject was digital display systems... I had not studied a word for that exams and wrote all sort of nonsense in the paper... must have written for about 10 marks out of hundred and when the results came I got 96% ...so yea even that was a failure). Right now my writing this post instead of studying is also a sign of impending failure in my oh so sad exams.

But then, an optimist would say .... Failure is the stepping stone for success. And that leads us to
Bill Gates -> college dropout who founded Microsoft
George W. Bush -> failed oil executive who became president of the USA

Hmmm... guess I should go with the optimist

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hahahahaha actually, i am thinking of failing an exam too, next year perhaps... i like ur blog though I cant understand a lot of things in it... (and by the way, who is this ashwini, the ´queen of ur castle´ ??? hahahahahaha)

Govind said...

Ashwini is my neighbour ...said she would kill me if I did not write something nice about her