Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
February 2012
January 2012
- Offensive Advertising, Increased Sales?
- I Sold Out For Millions, Then Worked At McDonald's
- Steve Jobs on Failure
- The Famous Western Failure
- Thank Goodness for Drug Addicts
December 2011
- It's a Wonderful Failure
- Stadium Destroyed, Reborn
- Failure to Trust the Astronauts
- Failure and the Baggy Pants Tradition
- Failure at The Happiest Place on Earth
- Saving What Was Lost
- FailureBank: A Social Learning Utility
November 2011
- A Thanksgiving Failure
- Harriet Tubman's Clever Lie
- The Failures of Lemieux
- Failed to Return a Text
- Admitting Failure
- A Leaders Job: Support Failure
October 2011
- [VIDEO] Mistakes with Tasty Dum Dums
- Failure and the Chocolate Chip Cookie
- Failure Goes Digital
- Using AIDS to Fight Cancer
- Victory Despite Obstacles
September 2011
Thomas Jefferson’s Mistake
When Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, he made a curious mistake. One word might have changed the fate of our freedom.
As reported in The Washington Post, new technology at the Library of Congress shows that Jefferson changed a crucial word in an early draft:
Using a modified version of the kind of spectral imaging technology developed for the military and for monitoring agriculture, research scientists teased apart the mystery and reconstructed the word that Jefferson banished in 1776.
“Seldom can we re-create a moment in history in such a dramatic and living way,” Library of Congress preservation director Dianne van der Reyden said at Friday’s announcement of the discovery.
What was the switch? Jefferson first wrote “our fellow subjects.” Then he changed it to “our fellow citizens.” Journalist Marc Kaufman describes this discovery as follows:
No longer subjects to the crown, the colonists became something different: a people whose allegiance was to one another, not to a faraway monarch.
Here’s an amazing picture of one of the researchers showing the discovery:
Even Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States and an early leader and president, made serious mistakes. You might argue that if he didn’t feel strongly about seeing his mistake and correcting it, we would live in a different world today.
In 1776 and 2010 alike, failure is the secret to success!
