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David doesn’t do failure

Reader question: This is a line from the movie Frost/Nixon: “David doesn’t do failure.” What does it mean exactly?

My comments: It means that David, David Frost that is, doesn’t accept failure. Or he doesn’t allow failure to happen. He won’t stop trying until he succeeds.

Or in David’s dictionary, you might say, there’s no entry for “failure”.

Still in other words, failure is not an option for David. It won’t DO.

In real life, of course, David Frost was a British talk show host, and in every conceivable sense, he’d be among the last people you’d imagine to have pulled off the first exclusive interview with Richard Nixon, the one and only US President to resign from office for wrongdoing, specifically due to what came to be known as the Watergate scandal.

But succeed Frost did, spending every penny in his own pocket as well as any money he could borrow. In the film, and during one of the few moments when Frost appeared to be nearing emotional breakdown, he said to his partner: “Why didn’t you stop me? Someone should’ve physically stopped me!”

Or something in similar vein, so you can imagine the pressure he put himself under.

Anyways, here are more examples of the phrase “doesn’t do failure”, or “excuses” and so forth:

1. Can men ever cope with women who are far more successful than them? Everywhere now I see couples where the woman earns more than the man but where the woman is still expected to shore up the masculine ego. This marriage was almost a caricature of that. This nice middle-class boy had to get more macho by the week - shooting, singing rebel songs, making gangster films - while his wife continued her obsessive need for world domination. He thought he could handle it. She thought she’d found a man tough enough to take it. But Madonna doesn’t do failure. She has worked hard at having the perfect marriage. For once the work has not paid off.