Eating Glass

Book excerpt: 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 and resilience to success. Yet, in our rush to bounce back from setbacks, we often miss that the journey through failure and renewal can be a difficult one that plays out over months or years. In this moving memoir, Air Force officer and entrepreneur Mark D. Jacobsen tells the story of his ambitious moonshot effort to use emerging drone technology to break sieges and deliver humanitarian aid in war-torn Syria. Even as his small volunteer team achieved breakthrough successes, cascading challenges brought down the effort and took Mark past the limits of his strength. In the two years that followed, amidst a grueling PhD program and a difficult faith transition, Mark learned to walk failure's path and find new life on the other side. Eating Glass is a compassionate and profound guide that 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.