I collected records by people you did not normally think of as singers – Tony Perkins (remember Psycho?), Vince Edwards (Dr. Ben Casey), the 4 Bonanza stars, Johnny Crawford (the Rifleman’s son), George Maharis (Route 66), and many more.

When I found out these were still very much useful, I went out and bought myself a Christmas present 2 years ago – a radio that plays audio tapes, cd’s, and records (45′s, 33 1/3′s, and 78′s). I’ve got Nat “King” Cole, Mel Torme too. Many happy memories to replay.

I pointed out to these young interns that if you didn’t fail once in a while, you weren’t pushing yourself hard enough. If you already knew how to do it, it wouldn’t be learning. And that in the end, if you succeed every time, you will never know your boundaries and never know what you are truly capable of.

Not that you want that type of thing to happen too often, I told them, and you don’t want to do something disastrous, but it was a small enough of an event that it wasn’t the end of the world. I felt that the organizer had learned a valuable lesson about outreach and publicity and wouldn’t make that mistake again.

To my surprise, most of the interns didn’t agree. They thought failure was failure and if you worked hard enough, you would always succeed. I wasn’t really sure what to make of that.

I still say that you can learn from failure, either by figuring out your mistakes or by finding out what your boundaries are–but maybe I’m just experiencing a failure in logic!

as for:’Have you ever noticed that I quote Thoreau a lot in these articles (and Ralph Waldo Emerson, too)? I can’t tell you how much of an impact Thoreau and Emerson’s writings have had on me over the course of my life.’

You also quote Walt Whitman and Thomas Jefferson, you might learn a different perspective if you read more of their works.

It doesn’t seem that it would be that hard to channel hostility against an employer (often how they justified the theft to themselves) to increasing hostility when questioned specifically how it happened.