Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
February 2012
- Unfinished, But Inhabited
- The Success of Failure, via CNN
- Einstein Actually Had Excellent Grades
- The Physics of Discarded Paper
- The Power of Failing
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
Failure and the Baggy Pants Tradition
NBA players are now famous for their baggy pants. But it turns out that this all started because of just one player and a private tradition.
Everybody knows about Michael Jordan. In fact, the NBA Encyclopedia calls him “the greatest basketball player of all time.” But the article also gives some insider information on his gym shorts:
He continued to wear the shorts of his beloved North Carolina basketball uniform under his Bulls uniform. This may have led him to wear longer game shorts although he has said that the extra length allowed him to bend at the waist and tug at the hem for a good resting position. Either way, the trend toward the baggy shorts was started and the entire league and sport would follow.
You don’t have to be a basketball expert to know that you only need one pair of shorts to play the game. But Jordan insisted on wearing both pairs, which required baggier pants. This makes no fashion sense, since no one could see them. And in the end, he unintentionally changed the appearance of thousands of players and millions of fans.
Failure is the secret to success. Changes in our world are often accidental, or caused by one person’s private devotion to an invisible change. Michael Jordan didn’t just miss thousands of shots and lose hundreds of games. He also helped define the uniform for basketball without intending to do so.
