"The Right to Fail"

I want to put in a word for the fink, especially the teen-age fink, because if we give him time to get through his finkdom--if we release him from the pressure of attaining certain goals by a certain age--he has a good chance of becoming our national idol, a Jefferson or a Thoreau, a Buckminster Fuller or an Adlai Stevenson, a man with a mind of his own.

We need mavericks and dissenters and dreamers far more than we need junior vice presidents, but we paralyze them by insisting that every step be a step up to the next rung of the ladder.

Yet in the fluid years of youth, the only way for boys and girls to find their proper road is often to take a hundred side trips, poking out in different directions, faltering, drawing back, and starting again.

Failure isn't fatal. Countless people have had a bout with it and come out stronger as a result.

History is strewn with eminent dropouts, "loners" who followed their own trail, not worrying about its odd twists and turns because they had faith in their own sense of direction.

To read their biographies is always exhilarating, not only because they beat the system, but because their system was better than the one that they beat.

I'm not urging everyone to go out and fail just for the sheer therapy of it, or to quit college just to coddle some vague discontent.

Recalling the three years of his life that went into it, talking almost with elation about the troubles that befell his unit in Cambodia, Brooks told me that he learned more about his craft from this considerable failure than from his many earlier hits.

Obviously the colleges don't have more than a partial answer--otherwise the young would not be so disaffected with an education that they consider vapid.

Success and failure are again becoming individual visions, as they were when the country was younger, not rigid categories.