The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download Chapter One for free at DrKenner.com and at Amazon.com.

This boy is at a fragile point right now. I do understand he is at a fragile point. Okay, he's got problems. Well, what problems does he have? Sure, he pushes people away before they have a chance to leave him. It's a defense mechanism, all right? And for 20 years he's been alone because of that. And if you push him right now, it's gonna be the same thing all over again, and I'm not gonna let that happen to him.

Don't you do that. Sean, what, Jerry? Don't you do that. Don't infect him with the idea that it's okay to quit, that it's okay to be a failure, because it's not okay.

Sean, how can failure contribute to your own happiness? I mean, that sounds like a contradiction on the face of it. With me today to discuss this is Dr. Eric Daniels. He has his PhD in American History from the University of Wisconsin. He's taught at the University of Wisconsin, and he is currently a professor at Duke University in the program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace. Dr. Eric Daniels is currently working on a book discussing how moral ideas have shaped the course of American political life, and his tapes and books are available on my website. He's written The History of American Moral Thought and The Inventive Age in American History.

Welcome to the show, Dr. Daniels. It's a pleasure, pleasure to have you on. When we think about failure, many of us give up at the first signs of failure. We'll try to get a job, and we get turned down, and we conclude, oh, well, what's the use? Nothing ever works out right, or I can't do anything right. And we give up, or we try a new project or a new hobby, and we're a failure at the beginning. Tell us about some of Thomas Edison's failures and how he turned them into a benefit for himself, how they contributed to his happiness.

Well, that's an interesting thing because Thomas Edison, over the years, made so many miraculous inventions that we tend to associate him with success. But actually, if we could analyze the number of experiments, and I'm sure any historian who wants to go back and look through Edison's various experiments will notice that Edison did a lot of things that just didn't work. Over the course of his life, he made many, many trials, and he came up with things that just didn't work. There's even a famous story when Edison had become more established, and he had his own laboratory where he employed engineers and mathematicians and others to work for him. Edison had gone through a number of trials on a particular experiment, and the guy working with him said, "We don't know anything." Edison looked at him, and he said, "What do you mean? We know 837 things that don't work."

This was when he was developing the power system for the light bulb. The filament for the light bulb is another great example. Edison had developed the principles of how electric light would work. He had made the significant scientific advances that allowed him to see what the basis for electric light bulbs would be, but he couldn't yet find the right fabric or the right type of material to use as the filament that you know in our light bulbs today. Edison decided this is the last step. He tried the two or three obvious things that any scientist would have tried, and they failed. A lot of people might have given up at this point. A lot of people might have said, well, maybe we weren't meant to make light because, after all, Edison was really striking out in a new direction scientifically with his theory about electric light. He might have given up, but instead, he said, "No, I'm confident that what I'm doing is the right thing. I just need to find the right material." He had his engineers and others gather all kinds of materials, anything they could think of, and he would roll these into filaments, and they would try them again and again and again and again. Literally, almost something like five or six hundred different materials were used.

I've been to two of his labs, and I just think he's incredible. He had animal parts from all over the world, and he's got plants from all over the world. You can still visit there today at the facility in Orange, New Jersey, and I think in Tampa too. It's just a vast warehouse of materials because even beyond the light bulb, with his other inventions, he always knew that some stuff, some part of reality, something out there, might be what he needed. So, he needed to collect this stuff so that when he was doing experiments, he wouldn't let the failures get him down. He'd always have more resources. He'd always have more tries. He'd always have more opportunities to make a success out of this.

So instead of saying, let's go back to the candle, primarily, I think it's because he believed in his own thinking methods. He had confidence in his mind. He didn't give up. He didn't have that attitude. I'm not even sure Edison really considered that anything he ever did was a failure, even though we might call it that. We might say, well, he failed at this, he failed at that. It may not actually be, in his mind, a failure. It was always just more data for his mind to process. It was another thing that didn't work, and so he filed that in his mind—this doesn't work for this application, and that knowledge...

Now, what about when other people say, "Oh, come on, Edison, give up. Tom, haven't you tried enough stuff? You're wasting your time. This is ridiculous. You're stupid." How did he deal with other people haggling him?

Hey, I got to interrupt this because we've got to pay some bills. Thirty seconds, that's it—a very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

Romance. Oh, I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where's that ad I saw? Here it is—the Selfish Path to Romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download Chapter One for free at SelfishRomance.com and buy it at Amazon.com. Hmm. The Selfish Path to Romance, that is interesting.

[The transcript continues fully corrected.]

250308200125dpod-failure-perseverance-happiness.txt