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So what do we learn from all this? Quit school? Go back to school? Walk away from our comfy, high-paying job? Run away to a Caribbean island? Bronson's subjects try all these solutions and more, but he has the good grace to spare us easy answers. The fact is, we already know from self-help gurus what to do. Follow your dreams. Never give up. Believe in yourself. The answers to the ultimate question are often cliches, and that doesn't mean they're wrong--they're just not very helpful. What's helpful is seeing that other people are trying too, even if they're failing.
Bronson is a fan of failure. "Failure's hard," he writes, "but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever." Bronson believes, and his stories prove, that failure is how you eliminate the wrong turns on the way to the right one. And that when you fall off your horse, sometimes all you get is a bruised rear end, but sometimes the horse is trying to tell you something.