Why is failure good?

Answer by James Altucher:

Failure is not good.

Failure is the worst thing possible. You feel sick. You feel like you're going to die. You feel like if you don't die you might kill yourself.

There is absolutely nothing good about failure. And there's nothing you can pretend to learn from failure.

Lately, we've been living in the Golden Age of Failure Porn.  Everyone wants to share their story. Everyone wants to "fail forward".

You can't learn anything from failure because don't forget that every single moment in your past has added up to that one moment in your present – where you are lying on the floor moaning your painful and abysmal failure.

Stop whining. And stop using the word "failure". Blah!

Here are better things to learn from. Failure has many cousins. Learn from one of the cousins:

Curiosity: When something happens and you don't understand why, then ask, "Why?"

Keep asking questions. Clearly, something confusing happened. Ask and ask and ask.

Guess what will happen: you will get answers.

Experiment: Sometimes people say Thomas Edison failed 999 times before he finally came up with the lightbulb on the 1000th try.

This is a total lie. It is normal in a lab to experiment with many many materials before coming up with the right one.

Oh! You're experiment didn't work? Ok, change something and let's try a new experiment.

Persistence: I get asked: how do I market my book? Or my app? Answer: write another book. Write another app.

The best way to get better, to get more known, to learn the subtleties of your art or your field or your sport, is to simply do it again.

Persistence + Love = Abundance.

Forgiveness: I used to live in regret. One time I sold a business for $15 million. Within two years I had lost almost all of the money.

And it wasn't money on paper. It was money in "real life". If I tell you how I lost it you would hate me forever. That's ok. But it's not important for this answer.

"Failure" is a word used to label a past event. That's 100% up to you how you label a past event.

When you label a past event "failure" it prevents you from moving beyond the past. You get stuck there. You keep time traveling to the moment of failure under the excuse that there is something to learn there.

The thing you learn first is forgiveness. Then you move back to the present. Get healthy. Be around people you love. Start being creative again.

Study:  When you get a question wrong on a test, a good student doesn't call it a failure.

It's a pointer to one single question wrong on a test. Study a bit more next time and you won't get that question wrong anymore.

Understand and study and remember the correct answer. Don't keep living in the past where you remember the wrong answer.

Athletes always go over their losses. They study videos. Go over games. Get advice from coaches. The coach doesn't say, "here's where you failed!"

He says, "here's where you should turn right instead of turn left."

Botvinnik, the World Chess Champion in the 1950s, noticed he often lost chess games to people who smoked.

So he would play practice games against people who would smoke in his face.

He didn't say "I fail against smokers". He became the World Chess Champion because of smokers.

"Failure" is not a detail you can learn from. Again, it's a label that describes nothing except a feeling inside of you.

Details are what you can study and learn from.

Hard Problems:

The key to success is to solve hard problems. Searching the Internet is hard. Google does it better than anyone.

Making an electric car is hard. Tesla does it better than anyone.

Figuring out a market for post-it notes was hard. The inventor tried for over 20 years. Now it's 3M's most successful consumer product.

Writing a book is hard. Maybe your last book was bad. That's ok. That happens to everyone's first book. Now read a lot of good books so you can solve the hard problem of what makes a good book. Then write.

Failure is not a hard problem. It's a label. Failure is in the past. Hard problems can be solved right now.

Don't Care:

When I thought I had failed, what I really was worried about was: would other people think I was a failure?

Yes. Yes they did.

When I stopped caring about that, when I took the word out of my vocabulary, I suddenly stopped caring what people thought.

Then what happened? Only good things.

—

My dad failed. He had a company that went bankrupt. He went broke.

Then he got depressed. He couldn't stop thinking about the failure.

Then he got sick. He was always sick. Because his body broke down from obsessing on the failure.

Then he got a stroke. Depression + stress + sick = stroke. Then he never recovered and for two years he never moved and could only blink.

Then he died.

I've started a lot of businesses. Some worked. Some didn't. Over a period of many many years. MANY.

I hope I've solved a lot of hard problems. Maybe not the best I could've but I tried. And then tried again.

I've slipped on the ice rink and got up. I've cried and wished I were dead but then I started asking questions.

Lots of questions. Lots of studying. Lots of learning. I've never failed.

I am still alive.

Why is failure good?

What was it like to be part of the genetic experiments on twins during the Holocaust?

Answer by Eva Kor:

My twin sister Miriam and I were used in Josef Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz as ten year old girls. We were taken six days a week for the experiments. On Monday, Wednesday,  and Friday, we would be taken to the observation lab where we would sit  for hours, naked— up to eight hours. They kept measuring most of my body  parts, comparing them to my twin sister, then comparing them to charts.  They were trying to design a new Aryan race so they were interested in all these measurements.

These experiments were not dangerous, but they  were unbelievably demeaning and even in Auschwitz I had difficulty  coping with the fact that I was a nobody and a nothing— just a mass of cells to be studied. On alternate  days we would be taken to another lab that I call the blood lab. This is  where they would take a lot of blood from my left arm and give me several injections in my right arm. Those were the deadly ones. We didn't  know the contents then and we don't know today. After one of  those injections, I became very ill with a very high fever. I had also  tremendous swelling in my arms and legs as well as red spots throughout  my body. Maybe it was spotted fever, I don't know. Nobody ever diagnosed  it.

As  a guinea pig in Auschwitz, we had to realize that they could do to our  bodies whatever they wanted and we had no control over what they put  into us, what they removed, or how they treated us, and there was no  place for us to go.

People often ask me, "Why didn't you run away?" I am  convinced those people know very little about Auschwitz. The barbed wire would electrocute you if you touched it. The whole camp was  surrounded by that. Before you got to the high voltage fence, there was a ditch filled with water. So as you approached that fence, your hands  were damp and you would be immediately electrocuted. At age ten, even if  I succeeded to get out, where would I go?

Maybe  I could have succeeded in running away when we were marched from Birkenau to Auschwitz I for  some of the experiments. But as far as I could see when we were  marching, that was all a military zone. Where on earth would I have gone if I escaped? I didn't know how far I would even need to run. And of  course most of the time when someone escaped and they turned on the  sirens, we would have to stand for roll call for two to four hours until  the person was found dead or alive. If the person was found alive, the  person would be hanged in front of us. The lessons were very clear. If  found dead, they would be brought in front of the group so we would  know, nobody escapes from Auschwitz. 

At age ten, I would not have dared to escape and I did not even think  about it. That was so far from my mind. What I was thinking about every  day was how to live one more day, how to survive one more experiment. I  knew as the air raids were increasing, that this could not last for much  longer. On the days when they would keep us for hours at roll call  until the escapees could be found, I would often think, "Good luck— I  hope you make it." I never thought anyone did. I was lecturing in San  Francisco about fifteen years ago. They had about ten survivors who were  introduced. One of them said, "I escaped from Auschwitz." I was so  excited! I went up to him and said, "Finally I know why I stood at roll  call for so many hours— I am glad to know somebody made it."

As twins, I knew that we were unique because we were never permitted to  interact with anybody in other parts of the camp. But I didn't know I was being used in genetic experiments.

I began lecturing about my own experiences in 1978. As I was telling my story, people would come up to me later on and ask about the experiments. Well, I remembered some details of my own experience, but I knew nothing about the bigger scope of the experiments. So I decided to read books about Josef Mengele, hoping to get more of an insight. But in all these books, it only had one or two sentences about him.

I was trying to figure out how I could get more information, and I was looking at the famous photo that was taken by the Soviets at liberation. I could see there maybe 100 children marching between those barbed wire fences who were liberated.

That is me and Miriam holding hands in the front row. I thought if I could somehow locate those other twins, we could have a meeting and share those memories.

It took me six years, but in 1984, with the help of my late twin sister Miriam, we found 122 "Mengele Twins" living in ten countries and four continents.

We had a meeting in Jerusalem in February of 1985.

We talked to many of them. What I found out was that there were many, many other experiments. For instance, the twins who were older than 16 or were of reproductive age would be put in a lab and used in cross-gender blood transfusions. So blood was going from the male to the female and vice versa. Sadly they did not check of course to see if the blood was compatible and most of these twins died. There are twins in Australia who survived, Stephanie and Annette Heller, and there is a twin in Israel who was a fraternal twin— Judit Malick, and her twins' brother's name was Sullivan. I heard Judit testify in Jerusalem that she was used in this experiment with a male twin of reproductive age. She remembered being on a table during the experiment when the other twin's body was turning cold. He died. She survived but had a lot of health problems.

The question is how many of these twins did survive? Most of them obviously died. I also know for a fact that Mengele did strange experiments on kidneys. Mengele himself suffered from renal problems when he was 16 in 1927. He was out of school three or four months according to his SS file. He was deeply interested in the way the kidneys worked. I know of three cases where twins developed severe kidney infections that did not respond to antibiotics.

One of them is Frank Klein, who lived in El Paso, Texas, after the war. He very much wanted to attend the gathering in Jerusalem, but he was on dialysis. He actually came with his nurse and very much hoped he would get a kidney so he could live like a normal person. He did get a transplant in 1986. I talked to him after the surgery and he said he was doing pretty good, but then three days later he died. The other twin whose name I don't remember off the top of my head died also because of kidney failure problems.

Then of course my twin sister developed kidney problems with her first pregnancy in 1960. The problems did not respond with antibiotics. In 1963 when she expected her second baby, the infection got worse. This is when the doctors studied her and found out her kidneys never grew larger than the size of a 10 year old's kidneys. When I refused to die in the experiment where Mengele thought I would die (read about it here: What gives you hope during tough times?), Miriam was taken back to the lab and was injected with something that stunted the growth of her kidneys. After her third baby was born, her kidneys failed. In 1987 I donated my left kidney to her. We were a perfect match. At that hospital in Tel Aviv they had been doing kidney transplants for ten years. None of them developed cancerous polyps except for my twin sister Miriam, in her bladder. All the doctors kept saying was that there had to be something in Miriam's body that was injected into her that combined with the anti-rejection medication to create the cancerous polyps.

Other experiments I have heard of from survivors: Many twins who did not have blue eyes were injected with something into their eyes. Luckily Miriam and I had blue eyes. Mengele did some other strange experiments. Most of them were very much in the line of trying to understand how to make blue-eyed blondes in multiple numbers, the germ warfare experiments, etc. If one twin died, Mengele would have the other killed and then do the comparative autopsies. According to the Auschwitz Museum, Mengele had 1500 sets of twins in Auschwitz. There were only 200 estimated individual survivors. Everybody who has been researching that, including the Auschwitz Museum, said most died in the experiments and I agree. Dying in Mengele's lab was very easy. I am one of the few I have heard about to be in the "barrack of the living dead" and get out of there alive.

I learned a great deal after the war in attending conferences, including one at the Kaiser Wilhelm  Institute. This is where Mengele studied, and today it is called the Max Planck Society. They were trying to collect information about Mengele's  experiments. They invited several twins and a few other people  used in experiments by Mengele. Here is a photo of me studying some of the vials used in experiments at Auschwitz:

Auschwitz was the laboratory for any experiments any Nazi scientists wanted to do. There was no limit on what doctors and researchers could do at these camps. So it was open season on twins and other human guinea pigs like us.

What was it like to be part of the genetic experiments on twins during the Holocaust?

What is the most beautiful line ever said to a girl in any movie till now?

Answer by Saurav Goswami:

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) has plenty.
For those who haven't watched this movie, it is a heartwarming movie about a girl's journey with her family to attend a beauty pageant.

There are many moments that the girl (olive) shares with her grandpa, who coaches her for the event & it goes down as my pick for the most beautiful line ever said to a girl.

​

​
​
Pardon me for the incomplete image. Here are the complete lines:

"Olive: Grandpa, am I pretty?
Grandpa: Olive, you are the most beautiful girl in the whole world.
Olive: You're just saying that.
Grandpa: No! I'm madly in love with you and it's not because of your brains or your personality. It's because you're beautiful, inside and out."

And then while she was performing on the stage like this:

​
​
A concerned lady comes running and this is what happens next:

​
​
The movie went ahead to win Academy Award for Original Screenplay & for Best Actor in Supporting Role. Lastly, what every guy & girl should believe,

​
​

What is the most beautiful line ever said to a girl in any movie till now?