(Advanced) Success and Failure

Lead in


1. If you were to devote your life to three main things - what would they be?

Which of the three mentioned in this book's title would you include in your three devotions?










2. Are you good at handling failure? Is failure something that can devastate you?

Talk about some experiences of failure in different aspects of life:

Academic - are you a 'good student'?

Social life - what is 'being socially successful'? is it being popular?

Romantic life - have you had the misfortune of having your heart broken?

Sports - have you ever failed to make a team, or lost a competition you were hoping to win?

Creativity - do you have artistic aspirations? Do people support you?

Family life - have there been challenges in your family that you can talk about in an English class!?

3. Have you seen the movie Eat Pray Love?

If not, what do you predict it is about?


















Watch the trailer to check your prediction:

Eat Pray Love trailer

Would you go to see this film?

What kind of person might have written the original novel?

Elizabeth Gilbert was once an "unpublished diner waitress," devastated by rejection letters. And yet, in the wake of the success of 'Eat, Pray, Love,' she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple — though hard — way to carry on, regardless of outcomes.

Before listening, add the missing sections into the spaces:

A. whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next

B. which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself

C. But it also left me in a really tricky position moving forward as an author trying to figure out how in the world I was ever going to write a book again that would ever please anybody

D. as tiny old tough-talking Italian-American broads.

E. But then I would find my resolve, and always in the same way

F. the difference between bad and good

G. I would have lost my beloved vocation

H. and feeling like I was her again 

I. Actually, I kind of felt bulletproof 
 

1. So, a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight, when I was approached by two women who I do not think would be insulted to hear themselves described ______________
_____________________ 

2. ______________,  because I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next...

3. But if I had done that, if I had given up writing, ___________________, so I knew that the task was that I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome. 

4. And it was devastating every single time, and every single time, I had to ask myself if I should just quit while I was behind and give up and spare myself this pain. ________________, by saying, "I'm not going to quit, I'm going home."

5. For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, ___________________. 

6. I found myself identifying over all again with that unpublished young diner waitress who I used to be, thinking about her constantly, _________________, which made no rational sense whatsoever because our lives could have not been more different. 

7. And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad, and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good, but your subconscious is incapable completely of discerning __________________. 

8. And you know what happened with that book? It bombed, and I was fine. _________________, because I knew that I had broken the spell and I had found my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it.

9. And if you should someday, somehow get vaulted out of your home by either great failure or great success, then your job is to fight your way back to that home the only way that it has ever been done, by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence ________________________.



A little bit more of the language:

marching up to 

book based on that movie.

all through adolescence, 

trying to unthread 

the chain of human experience 

the blinding darkness of disappointment

catapults you just as abruptly 

blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise

the distance you have been flung from yourself

getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche

remedy for self-restoration, 

 the dreaded follow-up to "Eat, Pray, Love."

sheer devotion 

don't budge from it

Link to TED:

Success and Failure





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