For instance take your failure to put an http:// in front of www.keplers.com...

Sorry. Serious for a moment.

What you say about suicide is true. For me the single most important and best decision that I ever made was to seriously confront the question of whether I wanted to kill myself or not. My answer was to figure out that if I couldn't find a way to make it better, then I did - even though I was remarkably loathe to do so. Which meant that I really, really wanted to figure out how to make my life better. (And for that I had to figure out what I wanted out of life, which it turns out is to be satisfied with how I live the damned thing.)

What was important there was not that I reached a moment of crises or being a mess. It was the fact that doing so left me wanting to do something about it. A decision which still motivates me over half my life later.

Failure uncoupled with facing and doing something about it is debilitating. The ability to face and learn from failure is the greatest strength you can have.

I am deadly serious when I say that a major failing of our society and school system is that we do not teach our children how to fail from a young age. Because without failure, there is no success. And no person is so marked for success that they get there without failing along the way.

Cheers,
Ben

PS One of my favorite books is The Millionaire Next Door, and it is favorite because of a section that nobody else seems to care about. What fascinated me was the section on family dynamics for families with money. The trend was clear. Children of rich people who allow mommy and daddy to provide a safety blanket fail. They are dependent, needy, have low self-esteem, and blow their inheritances. The chilren of rich people who succeed are the ones who actively tell their parents where they can put their support, and then go about building their own lives. Think about that. An offer of a million bucks isn't worth as much as the right attitude. Literally!