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Yes, and strongly if not fully. Shouldn't it? If not, why not?
by mmirate 9y ago
Yes, and strongly if not fully. Shouldn't it? If not, why not?
- sli 9y agoWe don't want kids who struggle with something to feel worthless. That tends to breed depression. Failure should be orthogonal to your feelings of self-worth. It's ok to fail, sometimes it's beneficial to learning (or whatever), but sometimes that needs to be made clear.
- atomical 9y agoWhat do you mean by orthogonal? I see no reason to tie self-worth to success or failure. It's a disadvantage. You are putting yourself at an unnecessary risk of feeling horrible.
- mmirate 9y agoTheir feelings are accurate. Failure, generally, is indeed quite costly, ergo it would be maladaptive to be even vaguely affine to it.
- quadrangle 9y agoYou can't say generally that failure is costly. Tons and tons of failures cost nothing at all. Failures are inherent to learning. You can't generalize about the cost of failures, it totally depends on the type of failing. Now, if you read the word as a state of being as in "being a failure" then you missed the entire point. The fixed mindset of seeing yourself in your identity as "a failure" or "a success" is stupid and should be discouraged. Failing is a verb, it's something you do or don't do in all sorts of cases all the time. It would be better to never think any of it is about "being a failure" in some personal identity way.
- mmirate 9y agoBe it measured in raw materials, labor, time or "merely" money, most failures cost. In fact I've yet to hear of a fallible endeavor that can fail without first expending at least some portion of the investment required for success. (And if it requires no investment, I've no idea how it is supposed to produce anything.)
- mmirate 9y agoAnd as to it being "worthwhile for learning" ... failure in that context just means you didn't learn/know enough before you tried.
- quadrangle 9y agoSure, that makes sense. The point is that if the only cost is the cost of the attempt itself, then it depends on that detail. The cost of me posting this is some time and energy. By bothering to post, I continue practicing communication skills and open myself to learning new perspectives from others. If all that succeeds, maybe it's worth it (although maybe I have more valuable things I should be doing). If I fail to have a productive exchange, then the cost of time and energy is indeed non-zero. But I will have a good chance of learning something about where I went wrong (because I have a habit of reflecting on things and learning what I can from each little exchange), so it's not a total loss. But I'll accept I was wrong to imply that there's absolutely no cost to some failures, that was too strong a wording. I'd count that as a minor failure in my efforts to communicate with nuance. I'll keep working to improve. Cheers
- atomical 9y agoWhy not? Because if your self-worth is tied to your accomplishments you are at risk of having a low self-worth in the future! The economy collapses, you lose your job, or your partner requests a divorce. These are things you can't control.
- mmirate 9y agoYour statements are all true, in isolation from the question they answer. But I do not see why this risk means that self-worth should not be connected to accomplishments. As I see it, an analogy to your argument would be that making a car's fuel gauge dependent on the amount of fuel in the car's fuel tank, means that the car is at risk of showing a low reading on its fuel gauge in the future.
- atomical 9y agoSelf-worth doesn't have to be connected to accomplishments, so why should it be? The car doesn't need fuel because the engine runs fine without it.