An aspiring entrepreneur made a poignant comment in a recent conversation.

“I can only do it,” he said, “if I know it’s going to be successful.”

My first reaction to this was amusement. If course we don’t know that a new venture is going to be successful. Nobody can tell the future. But then, when I reflected on this idea more deeply, I came away with a different view.

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When I was a kid, I was just in awe of professional musicians. How do you get up on stage and play song after song and not mess up?

Well, I’m still in awe of professional musicians, but now I understand something fundamental: Most of the time, whatever they’re doing up there is as easy as driving around town or carrying on a conversation.

It takes a degree of effort and concentration, but it’s within the range of routine activities. They’re not pushing themselves so hard that they’re risking a train wreck in front of hundreds or thousands of people. They’re doing something that they can already reliably do.

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A young man had a big dream. He wanted to leave his job and create a business that would sustain him. He was afraid of failing.

I asked him how he would define failure — and success. After all, if you know what you are going for and what you’re trying to avoid, you can create a vision for the future and a map that will help you find your way.

To my surprise, he defined failure as an inability to make the business replace his day job within a tight time frame (I think it was six months).

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When educators and coaches talk about the benefits of failure, we’re not talking about creating a $200 million film that’s a flop at the box office, launching a startup that uses all your life savings and runs up $100K on your credit card, or running for president and losing.

I suppose those failures build character, but those kinds of “place all your eggs in one basket” failures distract from the everyday struggles that really make the difference in our success. These are the failures in which we’re risking our self-concept and ego, as opposed to money and prestige.

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Every aspiring classical pianist wants to learn to play Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” Some two hundred years after its composition, it’s still irresistible. And the good news is that the well-known theme is very simple. The harmony consists of only four chords, meaning that it can be taught by rote. The hands don’t play together very much — they just overlap. In other words, you can show someone how to play it even if they don’t read music and don’t have a lot of experience.

What many people don’t realize is that “Für Elise” has two other themes that are lesser known than the iconic A-section. These parts are not for beginners.

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