American business has no time for failures.

My comments:

Literally if you have no time for doing something, you don’t have the time to do it. Perhaps it is from this that now when we say we have no time for somebody or something, we mean figuratively speaking, we can’t be bothered with them.

In other words, we are impatient with them (because patience takes time). We dislike them. We cannot stand them.

In the above example, when American business is said to have no time for failures, that means Americans cannot tolerate failure, want nothing but success and success immediately. Cannot even wait for it. To elaborate, companies may fire their CEO after two consecutive quarters of bad performance, for instance. Or investors may stop pumping money into a startup at the first sign of trouble.

Or, the long and short of it is, if you’re a businessman in America and are failing at your job at some level, don’t ask for sympathies.

Don’t ask. Nobody has the time, literally, to listen to your troubles. As a failure, you’ll find that they have no time for you.

And quite frankly not just in America, either, both businesswise and otherwise.

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Go to Zhang Xin's column

本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.