1) The failures speak louder about a person than victory; I say this in the sense that they're still able to push for and achieve their own unique victories. Even after past encounters and results having been negative and undoubtably bogging down on their minds. Each of the people researched by Koehn share different, although similar means of hardship, all of which despite having met failure a number of times (or all at once) still found it in themselves to strive on while others would've quit. Success on the other hand does have it's own impact, but to emerge as the winning side/a winning person can only speak so much from an outsider's point of view.