• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

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I was reading the latest issue of Ode magazine earlier this week and really appreciated their feature and focus on failure. The whole issue was about the “upside of down.” I just recently blogged about failing faster so this was a nice supplement to my recent pondering.

I was especially intrigued to stumble upon Ode’s mention of the online Failure Magazine.

Jason Zasky learned firsthand the potential of tinkering with an offbeat idea. As a writer for the now-defunct Musician Magazine, he and the the staff were laid off in 1999 when the magazine folded. He found himself walking the streets of New York City with his cousin, who suggested he start a magazine about failure. Now co-founder and editor of the online Failure Magazine, which just celebrated its eighth anniversary, Zasky jokes, “As soon as I heard those two words together, I like to tell people now, I saw failure as my future.”

And naturally [Jason Zasky] has a lot of perspective on the topic after eight years writing about it. Mainly, he feels, failure is in the eye of the beholder. “Success is kind of boring,” Zasky says. “Failure is much more interesting to read about, and to study, and certainly to work on. It’s a universal experience we can all relate to.” Often, he says, success is completely accidental, and is built on something that is viewed initially as failure.

Having failed way more times than I have succeeded, I am always encouraged by failure’s many advantages. Did you know Viagra started out as a mistake? Ode’s Marisa Taylor says that in 1992, “Pfizer was testing the drug sildenafil for the alleviation of angina, chest pains caused by heart disease. The men involved in the clinical trials for the medication found that, while it didn’t affect their chest pain very much, it did have a marked effect on their libidos. Pfizer’s blunder launched a multibillion-dollar industry.”

Talk about an upside (no pun intended) to failure!

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