Success and Failure: which teaches us more?

So I'm a big fan of Glenn Beck. Not only do we share the same faith, but he is an honest guy who treats everyone with integrity and respect, but he doesn't give a pass to people of his own political views either.

He did an interview a while ago with now-impeached Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, and said that while he believed he was guilty, he thought Gov. Blagovich should've been able to present a defense. He followed that up with another interview with Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, someone Glenn respects and shares faith with, but was quite upset that Sen. Hatch voted for the acceptance of Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary, saying that although Geithner may be the most well-qualified man for the job, his tax evasion was too dishonest, and our country's need for honesty was more dire than the need for financial strength.

Anyways, what I wanted to share was his interview with Chris Gardner, who inspired the movie The Pursuit of Happyness. It's an awesome movie and, as is always the case, an even better story. The point is that in the pursuit of success, there will always be some failures, and through those failures we are taught how to be better and more successful. So, here's the interview.

(edit---the previous video was removed from youtube by the user, so I found another video in two parts as follows)

My first official post!

So a few months ago I finally bit the bullet and joined the community of facebook. Before that I saw it as sort of like Children of the Corn...a group of brain-washed drones that cause you trouble until you join up with them, but now that I have joined I have no more doubts. I waste more time on there than I do sleeping, although it has allowed me to get in touch (and stay in touch as well) with people I haven't seen in some time.

So now after reading blogs from friends for a few months now, I've decided to take this plunge as well and start a blog for my family. Soon I'll have the skinny pants and fuzzy moon boots and hail praises to the mighty Obama just to join up with every other new fad that's coming along. My feelings on blogs previously were that I didn't think anyone else would care enough about my family to want to read a blog about us, but I figured that this was a lot easier than keeping a family journal, and my kids can read about our family life years from now.

So here it is. I'll probably spend now more time on here than I do with my kids, all for the sake of posterity. But I hope that this will be fun for the whole family, and I'm sure I'll let my oldest, Joram, take a crack at writing as well. Anyways, I hope for those of you who actually read this garbage, enjoy. If you just came to look at the pictures, well, there aren't any yet. Come back later when I figure out how to do that stuff.