Success Quote by Washington Irving

Failure has a cheap seduction: it offers you an identity. Irving’s line skewers the tempting shortcut of turning one bad outcome into a full-blown verdict on the self. “The easiest thing to do” is doing heavy work here, framing self-flagellation not as humility but as laziness - an escape hatch from the more demanding task of honest diagnosis. If you blame “lack of ability,” you get a clean story with a grim kind of comfort: nothing needs to change because the problem is you, permanently. That posture feels bleak, but it’s also oddly self-protective. It lets you avoid messier explanations like poor preparation, bad incentives, limited information, or plain randomness - the factors that would require effort, adaptation, or a confrontation with how much is outside your control.

The subtext is moral and psychological at once. Irving is warning against a specifically modern trap: confusing self-knowledge with self-contempt. Calling yourself untalented can masquerade as realism, but it often functions as preemptive surrender. It also keeps pride intact. If you “can’t,” you never have to risk discovering that you could have, and simply didn’t.

Context matters. Irving wrote in a young America busy mythmaking its own meritocracy, where personal character was increasingly treated as destiny. This sentence reads like a rebuttal to the era’s emerging gospel of innate aptitude: not because Irving denies talent, but because he distrusts the absoluteness of talent as an alibi.