You touch on the subject that haunts me, and the reason why it haunts me is actually stated in your article! With all due respect and as much humility as I can muster, I would like to focus my remarks on differences of viewpoint rather than simply praising your valuable contribution. With this focus, your article and hopefully my commentary will become an enriched communications package.

What do you mean by the phrase “people fail”? I hope that you mean the encounter of failures by people, rather than pointing to a class of people who are considered to be failures. The remainder of the text suggests that you actually mean the former, in which case I would recommend that you worry about the image of approving the branding of people as failures.

I see a near inconsistency in the second paragraph. It seems to praise the effort to avoid mistakes and then soon tells us that learning from mistakes is an important part of learning how to succeed. Since we all should wish to learn from the mistakes of others so that we can conserve our energy to learn from new mistakes, both of your observations are reasonable; but I think you should express them in a different way.

Part of the different expression involves the following powerful idea that I learned from a businessman, who said in an invited LSE lecture that “I had to fail in business more than 20 times in order to become a celebrated successful businessman”! Reflecting on that remark and on my own personal history, I conclude that there are some lessons in life whose topics you don't even know about until you encounter the mistakes that bring the topics to your attention.

The implication of this rather strange idea is that for certain classes of endeavors, encountering mistakes is an essential part of the important learning process; because there s no book or course of class-room learning that would bring those topics to your attention. Thus in a particular way, the road to success becomes partly and inevitably paved with failures. (Yes, your text already practically says. I just wanted to restate it what for me in a more striking way.)

One of the powerful ideas that emerge from this line of thinking is that it is worthwhile to get good samples of peoples’ failures in a particular line of endeavour, so that we can study the features of the failures, perhaps with the help of subjective interpretations offered by those involved. For example, I am willing to bet that a small fraction of all the writers in Steemit are receiving hoped-for payments at the levels that they feel are worth the effort they are putting into the work.

Yes we should celebrate the successful Steemit authors; but we should spend as much time sympathetically examining samples of failures in different categories of writing on Steemit. It would be wonderful if the persons associated with these samples would be willing to come forward and help us to interpret the information; because out of the process would come a gold mine of guidance that is at least as good as the guidance you get from the advice offered by the successful authors.