2006年NPR美国国家公共电台十月-Failure Is a Good Thing（在线收听） |
| I believe in honor, faith and service. I believe that a little outrage can take you a long way. I believe in freedom of speech. I believe in empathy. I believe in truth. I believe in the ingredients of love. This I believe. On Mondays we bring you our series " This I Believe". And this morning we will hear the beliefs of Jon Carroll who's been a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle for almost 25 years. That's a lot of daily deadlines to meet, but he holds the belief to get them through. Here is our series curator, independent producer, Jay Allison. People often rely on personal beliefs that help them toward their goals. They want to be better people to serve others, to live successfully. But Jon Carroll's belief is not so much concerned with success, in fact, quite the opposite. Here is with his essay for " This I Believe." Last week, my granddaughter started kindergarten, and, as is conventional, I wished her success. I was lying. What I actually wish for her is failure. I believe in the power of failure. Success is boring. Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do, or doing something correctly the first time, which can often be a problematical victory. First-time success is usually a fluke. First-time failure, by contrast, is expected; it is the natural order of things. Failure is how we learn. I have been told of an African phrase describing a good cook as "she who has broken many pots." If you've spent enough time in the kitchen to have broken a lot of pots, probably you know a fair amount about cooking. I once had a late dinner with a group of chefs, and they spent time comparing knife wounds and burn scars. They knew how much credibility their failures gave them. I earn my living by writing a daily newspaper column. Each week I am aware that one column is going to be the worst column of the week. I don't set out to write it; I try my best every day. Still, every week, one column is inferior to the others, sometimes spectacularly so. I have learned to cherish that column. A successful column usually means that I am treading on familiar ground, going with the tricks that work, preaching to the choir or dressing up popular sentiments in fancy words. Often in my inferior columns, I am trying to pull off something I've never done before, something I'm not even sure can be done. My younger daughter is a trapeze artist. She spent three years putting together an act. She did it successfully for years with the Cirque du Soleil. There was no reason for her to change the act -- but she did anyway. She said she was no longer learning anything new and she was bored; and if she was bored, there was no point in subjecting her body to all that stress. So she changed the act. She risked failure and profound public embarrassment in order to feed her soul. And if she can do that 15 feet in the air, we all should be able to do it. My granddaughter is a perfectionist, probably too much of one. She will feel her failures, and I will want to comfort her. But I will also, I hope, remind her of what she learned, and how she can do whatever it is better next time. I probably won't tell her that failure is a good thing, because that's not a lesson you can learn when you're five. I hope I can tell her, though, that it's not the end of the world. Indeed, with luck, it is the beginning. Jon Carroll with his essay for " This I Believe." Over 15,000 of you have now submitted essays for our series and we're just made all of them available online. To browse, or search through these essays or to submit one of your own, visit our website at NPR.org. For " This I Believe", I am Jay Allison "This I believe" continues next Monday on "All Things Considered", we'll hear an essay from a 14-year-old in Milford, Michigan. Joshua Yuchasz, has Asperger's Syndrome and believe sthat people should have respect for others. Support for "This I believe" comes from Capella University. 1.fluke:[N-COUNT]If you say that something good is a fluke, you mean that it happened accidentally rather than by being planned or arranged. (INFORMAL) 2.preach to the choir:try hard to convince someone of something they already believe 3.trapeze:n. horizontal bar suspended from two parallel ropes used for gymnastics and acrobatics 吊架, 高空秋千 |
| 原文地址：http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/NPR2006/40913.html |