
“Even as we celebrate what we have achieved, applaud ourselves for daring greatly, and shrug off failure, we are dying inside. Because nobody has really, honestly told us what failure feels like, and the truth is, it is terrifying and it is lonely and it hurts like hell.”
“FAIL FAST, FAIL OFTEN, FAIL FORWARD”… We live in an age that acknowledges the importance of failure to success. Yet our relentless focus on success can leave us ill-prepared for the trauma, grief, and confusion that can accompany failure, whether in business, relationships, or life.
We all have experiences that shatter our sense of self and leave us gasping to breathe. The aftermaths of these experiences are rich seasons in which we can experience tremendous personal flourishing, but few of us are prepared for them or have trustworthy guides.
In Eating Glass, Air Force officer, Stanford PhD, and serial entrepreneur Mark D. Jacobsen has written a compassionate and practical guide to navigating these seasons. Drawing on his own experiences—including a failed humanitarian nonprofit and a grueling PhD process—he guides readers through four stages: failure, aftermath, healing, and renewal. With unflinching honesty and a consistently redemptive spirit, he names the thoughts and feelings we all experience in these seasons, giving readers permission to embrace their own stories.
Eating Glass will speak to any dreamer or achiever who is navigating the aftermath of a failure experience. It provides steady assurance that we are never alone in our journeys, and that our seasons of failure are fertile times in which we grow.
Table of Contents
(and additional samples)
PART I: MY JOURNEY
Crash
Embers
Renewal
PART II: FAILING
Ideas
Quitting
Doubt
Weakness
Burnout
PART III: AFTERMATH
Hurt
Sharing
False Starts
Wilderness
PART IV: HEALING
Health
Friendship
Faith
Waiting
PART V: RENEWAL
Freedom
Priorities
Boundaries
Gratitude
Perspective
Love
Afterword
Readings
In each video, I read a complete chapter of the book.
Podcasts and Interviews
Minimum Viable Podcast, April 29, 2021
Always in Pursuit, August 28, 2021
CFO Bookshelf, August 30, 2021
Background on The Syria Airlift Project
For those who want to learn more about the nonprofit effort described in the book, here are a few artifacts from that time.