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Career grief, the pain of unfulfilled ambition, is real and deserves to be taken seriously.

Our culture insists you keep trying until you succeed, but that message can quietly break people.

Early promise can be a curse. Sometimes the most gifted people fall the hardest.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again… Never give up on your dreams… you've got to have a dream; if you don't have a dream, how ya gonna have a dream come true?

The idea of striving valiantly toward success is so baked into our Western culture that it's almost a religion. Movies, books, and songs have been written about the heroes of our time who have struggled against adversity and come out on top. They started with nothing and made it big. Madonna arrived in New York in the '80s with only 20 bucks to her name and became the biggest superstar in the world; Oprah rose from humble beginnings to become the media titan of our age; Dolly Parton was so poor she wrote songs about her homemade coat of many colours. But it was all good because there's a cheerful ending to the story and they all lived happily ever after.

But what about the stories we never hear because no one wants to tell them? What about the majority of people who struck out for glory and fell short? In trying to write this post, it was nearly impossible to get anyone to open up about failure. No one wants to tell that story unless there's a happy ending. The fact that you lived out of your car and relied on food stamps is romantic and glorious when told from the perspective of your penthouse apartment, but when you're currently down-at-heel, it's filled with shame. As Alain de Botton famously said, America loves a success story but hates "losers."

While it's nearly impossible to get anyone to discuss their failures in life, and no one wants to ever frame their story as a "loser," I am in the privileged........

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