Americans often fail well, but this book will argue that we can fail even better, if we change the way we think about risk. We need a little more forager, a little less farmer—a little more forgiveness, a little less judgment.

“We’re losing money on every unit, but we’ll make it up in volume!”

Our best guess is that nosocomial infections (sickness contracted as a result of medical treatment) kill about 100,000 people every year—about three times as many as are killed in car accidents.12

“The reason we struggle with insecurity,” says Pastor Steven Furtick, “is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”

By contrast, GM pioneered annual model changes and attractive styling, was an early leader in auto financing, and developed multiple brands to suit different demographics and personalities—“a car for every purse and purpose,” as the longtime GM executive Alfred P. Sloan put it.

Moments of crisis can be transformative. They are awful, yes, but they also open up new opportunities that you wouldn’t—or couldn’t—otherwise have taken. In fact, the great mystery is not why crises so often seem to change our lives for the better. It is why we seem to be unable to change them any other way.

“Multiple iterations,” Skillman told the audience, “almost always beats single-minded focus around a single idea.” The people who were planning weren’t learning. The people who were trying and failing were.

Europe, in short, treats entrepreneurial risk-taking like farming: success is a result of hard work and good planning, so if you fail, it’s because you did something wrong.

If I’d been sitting alone in my apartment, it would have been hard to convince myself that I was on the right track. But as long as I had someone else there who was willing to say that we might get married someday, I had just enough reason for optimism to keep on doing what I was doing.