Joey

“At the same time that “self-made” entered the nation’s lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode—“I made a failure,” a merchant would say after losing his shop—“failure” in antebellum America became a matter of identity, describing not an event but a person. As the historian Scott Sandage explains in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, the phrase “I feel like a failure” comes to us so naturally today “that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness

“I have scarcely felt greater pain in my life” than on learning the news. “And yet,” he added, “there is very little in it, if you will allow no feeling of discouragement to seize, and prey upon you.” He told him to go see Harvard’s president and learn what obstacles he had to overcome, and how to overcome them. “In your temporary failure,” he wrote, “there is no evidence that you may not yet be a better scholar, and a more successful man in the great struggle of life, than many others, who have entered college more easily.” Lincoln said he knew this was true from his own “severe experience.” Indeed, many people of this era sought success in the “great struggle of life,” but there were few who felt the struggle more acutely.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness