If you want to achieve and earn real money, you have to be willing to risk and to fail.  But, today failure is a terminal disease, not a transition. Nowhere is this clearer than in the reaction to the early roll-out of healthcare.gov.

Healthcare.gov is just a website. A technical, complex, massive first-time website. Of course it has problems. of course it needs adjusting. But, a bad alpha does not equal a total failure. Alphas become betas, problems get fixed; fuck-ups become lessons. And still, a chorus screamed to shut down healthcare reform because of temporary problems with the storefront. People see mistakes as proof of low value, and, that’s a problem. This idea – that fuck-ups make you a failure – keeps you and most people you know stuck. In America, trying things that don’t work out doesn’t make you an adventurer – it makes you a loser. How did we become a country that surrenders to setback? We no longer make room for real rehabilitation. Prisoners are forever stained, why reality TV owns our channels, why politics pivots on current defeats – even minor ones. 

So commentators and politicians ridiculed health reform because of the bad roll-out of a website. And, you and I and everyone we know get a little more convinced that we cannot recover from missteps or failure, so we shouldn’t try scary things. Except everything great is at the end of a very scary bunch of steps. 

Reject it. Fuck-ups don’t make you a failure. You can recover, just like healthcare.gov recovered. Keep on going with whatever you’re trying. Remember Churchill: 

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.