Failure is a noun

I love language and when I do my coaching by phone, I pay the kind of attention to language that a hungry dog pays to barbecuing hamburger.
I especially watch for nouns. Nouns are lumpy. Nouns lump all sorts of things like time and place and circumstance and effort and evaluation into one word. A word like failure, or issue or trouble or in a degraded form "well, you know."
But most of all nouns leave out "how." If have an "issue," instead of looking at a behavior that irritates or frightens me, I leave out "how." Let me give you an example.
I have an issue with right wing zealots. Translate: when they blame all problems, past and present, large and small (I told you nouns are lumpy), personal and social on "the liberals" or "socialism," I am alternately frightened and irritate. Here's HOW they do it. They are NOT "wingnuts" (a noun) they are people who do specific actions (blame, lump, coalesce, complain) in public for the sake of Fox news.
More personally, when someone says "I am a poor student," I want to know how you do poor work, how you fail, how you don't cope, how you talk to yourself. I want those verbs.
I find it most helpful to combine my career as high school grammar teacher and executive coach. If those CEO's would use verbs have their problems would go away.
Buckminister Fuller, a hero of mine, observed, "I think I am a verb." He was right.