Full-fledged failure is genuinely unpleasant, and Silicon Valley plays deceptive word games to hide this. Most of what's cheerfully dubbed "failure" should be c

Full-fledged failure is genuinely unpleasant, and Silicon Valley plays deceptive word games to hide this. Most of what's cheerfully dubbed "failure" should be called "short-lived experiments that didn't work out." Those doodles-gone-wrong can be shrugged off. We can count rapid-cycle launch goofs in that category, because there's an easy chance to come to market a couple months later with something better. We can even include small-scale corporate wipe-outs, too, as long as it's mostly VC money that got squandered and the investors expect some duds in their portfolio. ("Deal me another hand, mister!") If it's five years of your life that collapses into dust, that's not fun at all. If it's a colossal product failure that damns your reputation (or your customers' lives) for keeps, that's pretty grim, too. I don't mean to get morose about it, but the key to longevity in any field involves making sure that your supposed failures actually are pretty transient and superficial. That is not always possible.