Of course, change can be terrifying, especially when something that seemed to work so well becomes exactly what you have to lose. Liquor. Drugs. Anger. Ego. All helping to get through life...and all carrying you closer to the loaded chamber.
Getting the public’s attention is never difficult for celebrities. Getting the celebrity to pay attention is something else. Sometimes you need the click of an empty chamber to sound an alarm loud enough to get your attention. Without the humiliation, without the failure, without the "bad luck," you may never notice that the gun you’re about to shoot is aimed at your head.
Any situation stops being a failure event as soon as we attempt to learn from it. Learning from it doesn’t include making excuses for your actions. Learning from it means you have to actually put down the gun you’re holding before you can you start making the real changes necessary to modify your behavior.
You'd like to learn your lessons as cheaply and as privately as possible. But short of that, videos run viral, telephone message machines and those darn butinski publicists may be the only things standing between a long life and a short cliff. The looking-good train has long left the station.
But even if the celebs choose not to learn from their failures doesn’t mean we can’t. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "Learn from others’ mistakes. We don’t have the time to make them all ourselves."
Steve Young is the author of "Great Failures of the Extremely Successful (www.greatfailure.com)
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