This morning on The Today Show, Dr. Mel Levine talked about his new book, Ready or Not, Here Life Comes.

The subject of the book is work-life preparedness -- and how twentysomethings lack it. The book examines why young people in this day and age are so shocked and confused when they exit childhood and enter the working world. More and more young people (and I'm one of them!) live at home for longer periods of time and flounder in a variety of careers before figuring out where in the world they fit.

Something about this book's topic reminded me of Steve Young's book on failure, and made me wonder if there's a natural connection between "work-life preparedness" and learning to benefit from failure and rejection.

It seems to me like adolescence sets children up with a series of very simple trials. You pass a test, you hand in your homework, you make the team, you graduate. For many people, all of these things are relatively easy. Maybe that's why so many of us are so shellshocked when we enter the corporate world. Nothing is quite as cut-and-dry as a Shakespeare quiz.

Perhaps -- just perhaps -- the students who fail out of classes, get cut from the football team and get dumped, repeatedly, by members of the opposite sex are the ones who go on to the greatest successes!

Anyway -- read both books and let me know what you think. Maybe we can design a course where overachieving teenagers are forced to fail, purely from a learning and rejection-preparation standpoint.