A Left-Handed Commencement Address: Section 2: Success Vs. Failure (25-39) Summary

Embrace the Dark Side…Where Failure Is Awesome.

  • You obviously didn't go to college and work really hard just so you can have a family…so what about success?
  • Well, success is bad. It comes at the cost of someone else's failure. We have "success" in America because a large part of the world is impoverished.
  • So, Le Guin doesn't want to talk about success. She wants to talk about failure.
  • We're human, so we're going to fail at some point.
  • What she hopes is that at our low points, we will be able to embrace that "dark place."