Fall In Love With Failure

The difference between the quitters and winners is being conditioned for the unexpected. When things are handed to us on a silver platter, too much, too soon, our confidence goes up un-anchored to our actual ability. Getting your ass handed to you early and often is a great embodied lesson that things may not manifest the way we expect. Winning too easily is a very dangerous thing.

Many navy seals recount that it’s usually not the most elite that make it in to the teams. Not the fastest runners, or swimmers. Not the most muscular, well conditioned people or star athletes. It’s the average lookin’ dudes that have something in them that allows them to persevere through adversity and wade through the river of waist-high dogshit. It’s not just grit or an obligation to the team; you need something really special to consistently eat glass and stare into the abyss of death.

One of the greatest failures of modern societies is to condition their populations to be risk averse. Ranking up through the traditional framework and efficiently moving on the well-treaded path will never prepare you for when shit hits the fan. The more red tape and perfectionism, the more paralyzed we become by the prospect of making mistakes, the less we innovate. All great things were born from experiments that statistically, should have failed. What we don’t appreciate is that time horizons matter a lot. The gambler may make more than the investor on a given night or month (if they’re lucky) but the investor reliably wins over a 10 year period. The habit of trying new things seems scary in the short term, but you never change without it. We all fail a lot for the first good while of doing something novel, but then it gets fun. After picking a few booming stocks like a hot shot and losing all your money a couple times, you start learning reliable strategies to tackle apparent uncertainty. Companies don’t fail because starting a business is a risky game, but because most people don’t stick with it when the going gets tough.

The super powers which I am most proud of are my joy of process and mania for failure. I love improvement and I know that by failing 999 times that my 1000th rep might be the time I get it right in a really big way. Failure is a feature not a bug. No one has ever gotten really insane at something without scraping their knees or cutting some teeth. Pain and adversity teach us much more than what can be captured in victory. The difference between riding the glass elevator to the top of Mount Everest and climbing it isn’t the view – it’s the person we become and the perspective we gain. Pride yourself not on the times you’ve won, but on the failures you’ve endured to get there.