I have led a life of failure, but I console myself with the fact that I’m too obscure for anyone to have noticed.

Even the small wins in life count.

Failure is the subject of great fascination in our culture. In American sports, every “season” has only one winner, so every league is made up of failures, as defined in this way: “not a winner = failure”.

Sports is an interesting window on the world: we hate and villify failure, but we know that our teams will fail more often than not. Sports fandom is moments of elation surrounded by long spans of frustration. People are hopelessly irrational about their sports teams, which I appreciate.

When my son was in high school, he played in the marching band. I went to all their team’s football games: in four years, they won something like 3 games. So they were “failures”, but played out on a very obscure stage.

Oddly enough, the longer I watched the team, the more I admired them: they did all the preparation, all the work, and brought all the emotion to every game. They were were often overmatched, but they kept showing up.

And that kind of courage can never be characterized as failure.