"I've commited more than 9,000 acts of malpractice in my career. I've lost almost 300 patients. 26 times I've been trusted to perform life-saving surgery and failed. I've manslaughtered over and over and over again in my life. And that is how I save lives."

It took me 3 application cycles to get into med school. I sat the £250 entrance exam 3 times. I completed a full-time Master's degree in a year whilst working full-time to help improve my chances. This quote was a small something that helped spur me on. Eventually I made it and I'm a Doctor now.

That’s what makes a good med student or surgeon. Or air traffic controller. If you make a mistake, you learn from it and don’t let it happen again. All of the good doctors out there have killed somebody before.

Or to put it another way, there's failure, then there's ethical failure, and the latter absolutely deserves all the excuses in the world to not want to court it. (But then what about if someone says "you're then making too many excuses" ... and it is precisely that failure mode that I get myself tied in knots about in many cases with things like, say, why it took so long for me to even begin to get into political "organizing" - I didn't wanna break personal boundaries in making relationships around sensitive topics due to a dearth of social skill and knowledge of how to navigate the innuendo-laden social world.)