October 27, 2026

Dare To Fail

He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.

Paul Tillich wrote this after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, arriving in America with no job and little English, forced to rebuild a career and a life from nothing. The Courage to Be, published in 1952, was his answer to a century gripped by the anxiety of meaninglessness and the fear of losing one's footing. For Tillich, clinging to the familiar out of fear was its own kind of collapse, worse than any single failed attempt. The line matters now because adaptation always asks you to risk being wrong before you can be right.