Read a Book, Why Don't You?

The Gift of Failure by Dan Bongino

I still think Follow the Money is the best book Dan Bongino ever wrote, but his latest book may be the most entertaining. In The Gift of Failure, Bongino has invented a new way to write an autobiography. Instead of chronicling a life in a coherent order (childhood, early years, personal life, career…) or bouncing from one major milestone to the next (marriage, career, achievements), Bongino instead picks a lifetime of disasters, small and large, and strings them together in a way that offers more insight than a conventional autobiography.

The book is short. It’s funny. It’s easy to read, and it’s inspirational. It is also pretty intense, particularly when you imagine what your own book of failures might look like.

If you want to know the whole Dan Bongino story, this is not it. You won’t find out how he met his wife, anything much about his family, and his years going to school. Dan holds an advanced degree, but you won’t find out about that here. Nor will you learn a lot about his first days broadcasting or how he wrote his several earlier books. A lot of the things that make up crucial parts of his current world are missing. What Bongino writes about here are all of the mistakes—disasters, really—that he experienced and how those failures shaped his life.

I have never met Dan Bongino, but I know that he’s not a narcissist. The reason I know this is that the book never tries to blame anyone else for his failures. Sometimes there are other people involved in his failures, but Bongino never shirks responsibility. From playing sports as a child to running for office to his many years in the Secret Service, this is a book about mistakes that Bongino owns up to.

The core of this book is that mistakes tend to shape us in ways that we never imagine while they’re happening. Bongino’s failures changed his life. The book demonstrates something I have long observed: we never get the life we expect. We often think we’re going in one direction, only to find out that we are forced to detour, sometimes forced off road, in ways that take us in the totally different path. And it is how we respond to failures that charts our course more than the failures (or successes) themselves.

Bongino wanted to be a Marine but for some really lightweight reasons, never enlisted. He also wanted to run for political office. He tried and failed. Not once, but three times. He never dreamed as a kid that he would be one of the world’s foremost political commentators in the new broadcast medium of podcasting. He never dreamed that being a commentator would force him to enter the world of technology as one of the architects of what has been called the “parallel economy.” Bongino came from a blue-collar family and aspired at first to blue-collar triumphs: serving his country. He probably never imagined much of a life beyond New York City.

I bet if you had his personal cell phone right now, you’d find the private numbers of Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson and other political game-changers. I bet that even the people who beat him out of his political offices back in Maryland do not have that kind of clout.

Or look at his podcast on Rumble. I was watching live when it topped 3 million viewers. That means 1% of the entire country tunes in to hear Dan opine about the various political issues of our day. And the podcast goes out on Rumble; Dan was one of the architects of this free-speech platform.

The Gift of Failure is not an self-help book, but it could be, if you read it right. It shows the value of following your heart into unknown territory, owning your shortcomings and mistakes, and pressing on no matter how hard things come against you. If you’re a whiner, you won’t like this book. Bongino has experienced pain, embarrassment, humiliation, difficulty, loss, and stress, but never once, not once, did he devolve into self-pity.

That right there is a sermon.

Bongino didn’t say this but I will: we don’t get the lives we expect. But if we use our failures as learning experiences and never give up on what is truly important to us … we can live a pretty amazing life. Not all of us will be center-stage famous like Bongino, but we can all develop our gifts, talents, and personalities to maximize who we are. And when we are the most we can be, the world can be a better place.

Highly recommended read, inspirational, funny.