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
Thank Goodness for Drug Addicts
Thank goodness so many veterans got addicted to heroin. If they hadn’t, we’d never understand how New Year’s resolutions actually work.
If you’re staring at a screen with an confused expression, you may want to check out this NPR story. To quote:
In May of 1971 two congressmen, Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy of Illinois, went to Vietnam for an official visit and returned with some extremely disturbing news: 15 percent of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam, they said, were actively addicted to heroin.
The idea that so many servicemen were addicted to heroin horrified the public.
This is a tremendously awful failure. The government responded with a comprehensive treatment program, which in part tracked addicts during and after their term of service. What they discovered was even more shocking:
95 percent of the people who were addicted in Vietnam did not become re-addicted when they returned to the United States.
This flew in the face of everything everyone knew both about heroin and drug addiction generally. When addicts were treated in the U.S. and returned to their homes, relapse rates hovered around 90 percent. It didn’t make sense.
So what happened? Researchers now believe that the servicemen had a physical addiction which was tied to their environment. They became used to life in the jungle and associated all of the routines in the theater of war with their drug usage. When they got home, the environment was no longer familiar. Therefore, it was easier to quit.
What does this say about New Year’s Resolutions? You’re probably going to fail at them, unless you radically change your environment. If you really want to give something up, try changing other, seemingly unrelated routines as well. You may have a physical addiction to the environment.
Failure is the secret to success. As awful as drug addiction is, this analysis is of landmark importance in understanding motivation
