I would like to tell you in advance（进展） that you're going to hear me say the S word a lot and you're going to hear me say the F word a lot too. So if some of you are sensitive（敏感的） about these words, you may（可能） want to leave right now. Okay（好）, I'm going to talk to you about success and failure（失败）. What is failure? What is this F word that people talk about all the time? I would like you to clap（拍手） twice if you think the things I'm about to say would be a failure（失败） in your own lives or in those around you.

  Clap twice if you think being expelled（驱逐） from school and refused（拒绝） by other school a failure（失败）. Clap twice if you think studying three years for a doctoral exam just to not pass（经过） a failure（失败）. Clap twice if you think learning（学习） a foreign（外国的） language for five years but still can't speak it. Like complete sentence is a failure. Okay, the first person that you might（可以〔用于礼貌地提出建议〕） have clapped（拍手） for was Albert Einstein. Is he a failure?

  He is known for his success, not for his mistakes. But today I'm not going to talk to you about famous people that we all know. I'm going to talk to you about Gary Green who most of you may not know and me who you just met a few minutes ago. So when I was little, Gary Green went to my school and he delivered（投递） a speech（ 演讲） about failures（失败）. He is the guy（家伙） who first introduced me to look at failures（失败） differently（不同地）. He said that he failed（失败） his doctoral exam after studying three years of special education（教育）.

  And even worse than that, his wife and he had planned a party to celebrate（庆祝） his passing of the exam. But he was informed（通知） that he didn't pass（经过） and needed to complete an additional（附加的） year of graduate school. As you are thinking about, what is he going to do about the party? Well, I emailed him and asked him just that. He answered by saying it would be cathartic to have a failure party where everyone celebrated various（各种各样的） failure（失败） stories at life and they just had a great time. After hearing about this story, my mindset completely（十分） changed.

  I thought to myself, not passing an exam were not the end of the world. So now I would like you to all think back to our clap twice exercise. Remember the last one? The person who failed at learning a foreign language for five years was me. So would you all look at me right now and call me a failure? When I first went to Argentina, a Spanish-speaking country, I could not speak Spanish or English for that matter（物质）.

  I don't know how many of you had the same experience（经验） as I did when I first started to learn（学习） a new language.