Your message is somewhat contradictory. You describe the need for failure, but what you ultimately describe is emotional failure, perhaps with some external, m

Your message is somewhat contradictory. You describe the need for failure, but what you ultimately describe is emotional failure, perhaps with some external, material loss. In much of the world and time up to this point, failure has meant a significant risk of irreversible loss to self. As in, for example, health that cannot be recovered. A social judgment or status that will not be forgotten and cannot be escaped. So much of the current talk about innovation, entrepreneurship -- I'm thinking of the lastest U.S. Administration program. A basic reason for the existence of this board. It takes change as a basic premise, a fundamental good. Here's the secret: Social structures develop and evolve to promote stability. It's that stability that allows a greater combination and coordination of effort in more advanced works. That enables and makes sense of deep and long term investments, material and intellectual. Those patterns can become constraining. Society reaches a limited "set point". Then change eventually overcomes inertia and shifts society out of this local maximum and back onto a course of less limited growth, of renewed prospects. And since society is (increasingly) complex, opportunities for change exist, in aggregate, constantly, although in greater or lesser degree in different segments at different times. Failure becomes desirable, when the benefits of trying outweigh the costs. When it won't kill you, or your family, or irretrievably break you -- then maybe you'll give it a go. Or when there is nothing to be gained in not trying. So, move past "Change!", and ask how to make change happen. Help its agents get unstuck from local maxima. And ask what the goal is: An endless, exhausting treadmill of ever increasing change? Or a happier medium, when people can create and feel useful and e.g. still have a family and kids before their 40's? This may be one component in why you don't hear so much about "blockbuster, breakout" start ups in Norway, to cite your example. Because people can grow their business to the point of having a good quality of life, without feeling that they must be the biggest because it's "winner takes all". (This is speculation on my part, but based upon some years' observation, reading, conversations, etc. And my speculation about Norway is quite limited and takes your citation of their startup rate as fact, because I've never been there. Also, admittedly, they have a lot of oil revenue at the moment, which certainly doesn't seem to hurt their aggregate well being. Something which is due in part, again, to preventing a "winner takes all" structure sought by "big oil"; regulation that has been cited and discussed here, before.)