10 ms·

In a society obsessed with success, how do we come to terms with failure?

142 points by plg 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
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sethammons 9y ago
TL;DR is the author spent years and years of dedicated effort as a gymnast and quit and did not make it to the Olympics. Describes herself as a failure as a gymnast instead of having failed (noun vs verb). And ends the piece with the suggestion that maybe we should all just settle with the knowledge that we will not achieve our dreams. Wow. Granted I read it quickly and maybe missed something. I take a different view. While the goal/dream is admirable, it is the journey that counts. I've been successful in areas, failures in some more, and somewhere in between on others. I've learned and I've grown in each. I've learned more in my failures than in my successes and they helped shape me into who I am. I feel that if you make the best choice you can given the information you have, you've nothing to regret. Strive to be better. Be grateful for what you have. Learn from mistakes. Sometime you'll lose so hard that it is earth shattering. The goal is to be able to pick up the pieces, and keep moving. The most important step you can take is not the first, but the next.
- justherefortart 9y ago
  I've been failing my entire life. Anytime I'm successful, I move the bar to restart the process of my next failure. I'm very satisfied with my life as I've achieved 10x what I ever thought possible. I'm future failing startup #8 at the moment. It's been dragging out a few years but I'll get there, or fail again! I always looked at failure as a learning process, not a function of who you are. Hell, if you won all the time, it would get boring. So instead of picking easy things so you can always be a winner, I pick things that are beyond my reach (in my estimation) and attempt to achieve those goals. Life is what you make of it, it can be like a rollercoaster at times and a lazy day on the beach at others. My biggest issue in my mid 40s is the "been there done that" attitude. Success isn't a destination IMO, it's a temporary culmination of prior good choices. And it can go away at anytime with as few as one bad decision.
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    Yea, society is obsessed with the glorification that you get rich quick and achieve success on your first try. Everyone doesn't even talk about how many things they tried to be successful. Or when they were lucky and things just worked out. On the other hand the playing field is not even at all and the luck of being born in a place that is beneficial or to people that have benefits that others don't have is not to be discounted either.
    - justherefortart 9y ago
      Agreed. My father owns his own business. My grandfather helped him after it failed 2-3x. My father however, "did it all by himself". Bootstraps and whatnot. He was lamenting to my brother a few years ago that he has no legacy. Well, you fucked over everyone in your family, including your kids to get yourself ahead. So yeah, you'll die rich and unloved. Surprise outcome!
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Could be worse...you could be General Ulysses Grant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant) who was very successful at doing one thing that was vitally important, but only in a limited time and place, and pretty much a failure at everything else he tried.
- ataturk 9y ago
  First world problems! I competed in two different Olympic sports and although I attended the Junior Olympics for one of the (big whoop, right?) and didn't place, I never once thought I was a loser--you just look at the competition and how a mere few seconds determines the winner versus going home with nothing. People have peak days, others are just a tiny bit off. What I realized is that greatness has a component of luck to it. I figured I was lucky to be able to compete there at all. There are letdowns for sure, but you're not competing with others as much as you are competing with yourself. ETA--Having attended the Olympic Training Center around age 16, I can't tell you how depressing it was to see 20 and 30-something athletes living in the dorms there, striving for their moment of glory while everyone else was out having fun, working, starting families, etc. I look back at that as the moment I made a very conscious choice to focus on having a career. Olympic sports aren't pro sports, you aren't getting endorsement deals unless you're in one of the "popular" sports like swimming or downhill skiing.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    I thought this post contributed to the discussion here so I vouched for it. Yes one of the things you hopefully learn in sports is not just teamwork but that you are ultimately trying to be a little bit better every practice, every competition. And that is all on you, and success is measured individually. It's one of the things I like about sports like running, you can always compare your performance with your previous time. Setting a new PR ("personal record") is what you are mostly striving for.
  - astura 9y ago
    >I can't tell you how depressing it was to see 20 and 30-something athletes living in the dorms there, striving for their moment of glory while everyone else was out having fun, working, starting families, etc. It might be depressing to YOU because it's not what you'd like for yourself but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's depressing for the people living it, after all, it's what they have chosen. Not everyone is exactly like you and wants the same things in life. I see people living their lives in all sorts of ways I would consider absolutely awful and depressing, but I don't project my values and goals on them.
  - 9y ago
- whopa 9y ago
  > I feel that if you make the best choice you can given the information you have, you've nothing to regret. You did miss something. Trying to be a gymnast wasn't her choice, her mom made that choice for her when she was 3 years old. This is the story of a failure to be elite in the sports world, and coming to terms with a dream that was externally foisted onto her at a formative age that didn't get realized. I don't think this situation applies to the scenarios most HN readers deal with. Your advice is a lot better for this crowd.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    This is a big problem in youth sports. Forcing kids to specialize at a very early age. A far better approach is to expose your kids to a variety of sports and let them figure out which ones they like. I do think kids should do sports, the activity is good both physically and mentally, they learn that effort produces results and they learn how to win and lose and move on. And it opens them up to social situations that they will otherwise be completely cut out of. But unless your kid is one of the rare ones who is really athletically gifted, setting up dreams of scholarships and professional careers is just setting them up for failure. You should not even be thinking about that until about middle school age, and only on advice of people who will give you an unbiased evaluation. Johnny may be the best football player on the team and still be absolutely unremarkable for scholarship or professional consideration. Most parents, unless they were elite themselves, don't know enough to judge and certainly are not objective.
    - mcguire 9y ago
      This would probably be best for the kids, but... "...not even be thinking about that until about middle school age..." your kids will never be professional football, baseball, basketball (or soccer, probably) players, or Olympic gymnasts, or classical musicians because they will be competing against people who have been practising since they were three. No matter how much natural gift they have.
      - ams6110 9y ago
        Disagree. Professional athletes cannot be made by practice alone. The natural gift, coordination, balance, athletic ability, competitive drive, and other inborn traits are what matters most. There are professional athletes who didn't even seriously play their pro sport until high school, and uncounted thousands of kids who were pushed into something in preschool and never earned a dime from it.
- notyourwork 9y ago
  You raise a really interesting perspective. I look at this as optimist versus pessimist perspective. Not achieving something can be considered a failure to one person and a learning less to another, glass half empty or full. I have personally struggled with this and it makes me wonder if there is a particular way a child grows up that places them on one side or the other. Is it parenting that creates this perspective or is it life experience as a child such as not getting picked for a team or not being first chair in band. After 30 years of life and achieving what I consider career success I wasn't sure I was capable of I have identified my pessimistic attitude as a fallacy in my personality. Constantly I am trying to change it but it can be really tough to not focus on failure and identify the positive's of events that don't turn out as planned.
- darod 9y ago
  Success in sports is very different than success in programming. There are very specific events that people have a limited time to train their bodies for so that they peak at the right moments. If you don't do it within that time frame, the opportunity is lost. A programmer doesn't have a comparable definable event and there's no limit to the amount of times you can peak with creating a business outside of dying. All athletes must ultimately redefine themselves, whether as a trainer/coach or move to a completely different industry. When that transition happens they have to live with the result of the investment they made in their athletic careers. A coder can program from childhood to death and never has to redefine themselves outside of learning more languages, frameworks, platforms and that applies to their entire life.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Mostly true, though I've known a few people who realized, after several years, that they were "not cut out" to be programmers. They then had to redefine themselves in that way. But you're right that athletics is unique in that there are a small number of years in which your body and brain are in the right stage of development to achieve peak performance. If you don't achieve your goals in that time, the only consolation you can hope to take away is that you made the effort, and hopefully reached the limits of your capability.
  - analyst74 9y ago
    what GP means is not that you are granted success if you keep trying. he/she is saying that the fun is in pursuing something beyond your abilities, knowing there is a good chance you will fail in the end.
- aaavl2821 9y ago
  I also think that the rewards for success are much more concentrated at the top for professional sports versus other fields. there is a wide spectrum of talent in professional domains, and a wide spectrum of jobs such that even mediocre talent can often get reasonably good jobs. And in many fields, you have decades to build your career and many ways to succeed (versus a short physical prime and one very narrowly defined way to succeed: winning an Olympic medal) I think most elite athletes training for and even competing in the olympics can't sustain themselves financially with their sport. As they get closer to the top they probably get more financial support / prestige, but if you aren't on the medal stand I'm sure much of that comes to a screeching halt
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Professional sports is an entertainment business. There isn't much room for mediocre talent: nobody will pay to watch it.
- tomrod 9y ago
  > Within a millisecond we hear “hey, none of that. We’ve asked you to be respectful.” Absolutely this. Failure is an opportunity to re-evaluate a project, approach, or other categorizable area of effort. It should not be feared. It certainly shouldn't be used to define the character of your life -- as you state, noun versus verb. When failing is a verb, you get a chance to reorganize. To make better. To build opportunity. It's an absolutely exciting time, if you let it be.
- mcguire 9y ago
  "...spent years and years of dedicated effort as a gymnast and quit and did not make it to the Olympics." IIUC, the author quit because she was reaching puberty and her abilities were in decline, so she would never get any farther---that was why her coach changed her routine, leading to her quitting. That is why she describes herself as a failure---she had a goal, put a great deal of effort into it, and then realized she would never be able to achieve it. It's a part of growing up, realizing that you won't be able to realize some of your goals, either because of factors within you or factors outside your control. And it's probably worse for those like these gymnasts who have invested so much into the attempt. "It is the journey that counts" is a fine response, but it doesn't really help the initial pain.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  Well, it that if one is to make the journey worthwhile, one needs to structure the process of an activity so it has value. Learning and enjoying along the way could be a happy accident but I suspect this happy accident was far likely before our society reached the point that it could structure every waking moment of a given person's life with the purpose of reaching a single goal (a description that could apply to 14 year old gymnast, the 20-something entrepreneur or the aging Amazon warehouse worker). There are obvious steps that can be taken here. * Work hard but not so hard you're squeezing the life out of yourself. * Take time to evaluate your success and failure and how much you've progressed * Work on a project that involves other people so you can experience camaraderie in the result. * Think about the "next step" for everyone or a large portion, of those involved. College and graduate have a lot of these qualities, though they seem to be fading over time. Work in a large organization can sometimes have this quality depending on the quality of the organization. Work in startup or as an entrepreneur seems to demand the person or organization can create the qualities themselves. Work for uber or in low-level retail can have none of these qualities and the individuals for it. And in society as a whole, we're suffering for the lack of these things.
everdev 9y ago
Competition is designed to have roles succeed, not people. In business or sport, we want the best to succeed. In that sense competition is a success as long as it's fair. The people or businesses in the competition are essentially replaceable.
- mathgeek 9y ago
  > In business or sport, we want the best to succeed. This is inaccurate, or at least overly generalized. In both business and sport, many want those who contribute to the health of the field to succeed. Competition is good and drives innovation, whether that's technology or how to hit a baseball consistently.
petra 9y ago
>> Because who I'd be was just another ordinary, mediocre 12-year old girl. I rubbed at the calluses on my hands, sat in front of the TV and felt terrified that I'd never again be good at something. Nothing is scarier than that. To some extent, this is common in th west. But why is this so important to not be ordinary ? Why isn't it good enough to be good at something at your friends group, family, etc ?
- manigandham 9y ago
  It's not a rule. It's 100% subjective and what's good enough for you is completely different than someone else. Being good at something though usually is built on some kind of goals and purpose which tends to lead to more satisfaction and fulfillment.
- im_down_w_otp 9y ago
  The thing I've always found fascinating is that this cultural ethos is in direct tension with social organization. Despite this narrative arc of the primacy of individuality we still (quite predictably) shun people who manage to actually achieve it and generally celebrate homogeny among our cohort. I couldn't enumerate the negative effects this inherent contradiction may have produced, but it seems unlikely to be a list of zero length.
- VLM 9y ago
  Ordinary is no longer economically survivable.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    The problem is that most of us are ordinary by definition. If it's not possible to survive as an ordinary person we have a huge problem.
    - deleted 9y ago
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  - cortesoft 9y ago
fullshark 9y ago
Interesting title but this is just an excuse for a long form autobiographical blogpost.
flyinglizard 9y ago
“For most of us, our dreams exceed our limitations, and our ambitions lie far beyond our capabilities“ Not from my experience, no. Most people I know - the vast majority - don’t even try chasing the dreams they have. They are not failing because they’re not even in the game. Most of them do not have ambitions beyond those one degree apart from biological sustenance; they just are.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  There is a difference between not having ambitions and not working towards them. I believe that the latter is the case. Almost everyone wants status, money, and stability, but when someone doesn't believe they are achievable, they won't fight for it.
  - flyinglizard 9y ago
    You are of course right, but usually it’s a very weak “want” that doesn’t translate into a process of methodologically driving towards those goals and paying the price they exact.
  - tremendulo 9y ago
    True, but those are bad things to want: Status -- those to whom we accord the highest status seem to be people who genuinely don't care about status; Money -- companies which aim only for profit become incapable of change. Presumably something similar applies to individual fat cats; Stability -- societies which aim for stability get wiped out by the next invasion or natural disaster. ...which is perhaps why most people don't work so hard! So what are good things to want?
    - lsc 9y ago
      >Status -- those to whom we accord the highest status seem to be people who genuinely don't care about status; I think you are confusing people who don't care with people who don't seem fearful of losing status. As far as I can see, all "Leaders" are hyperaware of status and spend a lot of time managing their own status and the status of their peers and underlings. As far as I can tell, the further up the chain you go, the more aware you are supposed to be of status, and the more complex the status rituals go, but even at my level (and right now, I'm IT support for an organization of very advanced electrical engineers... so I'm fairly low status, compared to those I work around and compared to other positions I've had) - there are rituals and norms that need to be respected. That said, as far as I can tell, acting fearful (especially acting fearful of losing status) is one of the quickest ways to lose status, so I suppose that could contribute to them looking like they don't care... but from what I've seen, balancing status is a lot of what managers do... maybe most of what they do. And it's a difficult job (and it's super interesting watching someone who used to be technical who get promoted to management try to manage status; they are often a lot more explicit about it than managers who grew up in management, for whom the whole thing looks natural)
nimbius 9y ago
ive always based success on quality of life. For example, I once took the RHCE and failed by just four points. Looking at the cost of the exam at around $400, I decided to forego a retake as a hundred dollars per point seemed silly. What did it mean to me, and my definition of success, to be able to regurgitate old Apache ACL's on command? Not much, seeing as Nginx is of a higher priority to me. In the end I relegated the experience to that of a rat race. Being told you've failed the RHCE hurts but in no way does it mean you should settle with never achieving your dreams. Sometimes you've got to understand who sets the terms and definitions, and make adjustments as necessary. Letting others decide the objectives of success is tacitly hoping their outcomes and objectives for that often very personal success are as altruistic and self serving as yours. At some point, everything from Body Spray to luxury sedans set this bar in a predatory manner. Theres no reason to think the Olympics and private corporations in general wont at some point do this as well.
- ghaff 9y ago
  In some cases, the certifications associated with some score on a test do matter. It's one thing to pursue a certification, whether some IT certificate or passing the bar, for the learning experience and personal satisfaction. In those cases, it may well indeed make sense to conclude that you came close enough and move onto the next thing. But if you've spent 3 years in law school and really want to become a lawyer, it may well make sense to study harder and try to pass the bar the next time--especially if you didn't fail by much. (Don't actually know how much feedback if you get if you fail.)
shams93 9y ago
You look at the statistics and basically you're largely already born wealthy or you are in poverty especially in California. If you look at social mobility in California it's almost as bad as medieval Europe. The system that enabled hard work to be rewarded is gone. The creative professions that used to be a vehicle for persona wealth are gone. We are living in an era of corporate feudalism where you're either born on top or born to fail but the only question that is relevant today is "who's your daddy?"
- magic_beans 9y ago
  This comment is completely irrelevant to the article.
  - Applejinx 9y ago
    On the contrary, it's got a great deal to do with success and failure, and defines the only reason why such an article is important. If we can't disrupt success… 'move fast and break' success… we're very close to societal collapse. I turned a ten-year software business into a Patreon that gives away free software and is beginning to make it open source, and I feel I'm doing some tangible things to disrupt 'success'. Our sense of value has to be founded on different ground.
ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
What society isn’t obsessed with success? No one wants to fail in hunting, farming, business or anything else.
- dvanduzer 9y ago
  Some societies seem to focus more on individual success than community survival. I want to live in a society that is obsessed with creating a future where every member can thrive. Canada seems to be working a little harder at this than the United States, but both countries still have frontier culture heavily baked in.
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
    I want to live in a society where individual success is the obsession above all else. Society and community is made up of individuals after all.
    - saeranv 9y ago
      This seems a bit simplistic, or I'm not understanding your comment. It is trivial to prove that you have to sometimes deprioritize an individual's success in order to ensure group success. For example, it is beneficial to tax rich individuals to ensure the community has access to a social security safety net. Technically this penalizes a rich individual's success, however it is a critical factor in the success of the group.
  - deleted 9y ago
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- paganel 9y ago
  > No one wants to fail in hunting, farming, business or anything else. The supporters of the football (soccer, for the Americans in here) club that I used to root for ever since I was 9 (I'm now in my late-30s) used to have this wonderful saying: "It's better to hit the post with a beautiful shot than to score an ugly goal". That saying was one of the many reasons why I loved that club, which didn't have that many trophies under its belt. For what is worth, the club has now been dead for 2 years (it was founded in 1923) for financial reasons, so there's also that (it sucks to be a football club nowadays in Eastern Europe). I'm also a Mets supporter, so I guess there's just a cohort of sports fans like me who get attracted to clubs for reasons other than the "obsession to win".
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
By not idolizing/worshipping arbitrary measures of success (money, popularity) in the first place
vanillaboy 9y ago
> How do we come to terms with failure? To start, by not posting humblebrags a la "I was a world-class gymnast but...", "I failed that one time but I learned a lot check out my...".
keenmaster 9y ago
There are so many domains where you can achieve success or mastery so I just don’t buy the central message here. I think most people can be very successful in multiple domains, it’s just a matter of finding them and working hard enough. Gymnastics is an unfortunate thing to fail at since it’s a big commitment. Maybe that’s why the author was rendered cynical/defeated.
- cryptica 9y ago
  Pick any given field these days and you'll immediately be competing with millions of other talented people. Some of them have been doing it since they were children. There aren't many careers that you can change into and succeed. It's very rare nowadays and it's getter rarer because capital is becoming increasingly concentrated and knowledge is becoming increasingly specialised. The playing field is global now. Even if you want to do something as mundane as open a local retail outlet, now you have to compete with giants like Amazon who use profits from their monopolies in other industries to bleed you dry. The most important financial decision you can make in life is having the right parents. Second is marrying the right person. What you call cynicism is actually realism. You're the optimist. The fact that you have this world view suggests that either you were born into a well-off family or you got very lucky at some point in your life. In the same way that one wrong move can kill you in a second, it only takes a single stroke of luck to set you on a lifelong winning streak... Unfortunately, bad luck is the norm for most people. While it's true that the harder you work, the luckier you get, when your luck starts in the negatives, it can take a lifetime just to bring it to 0.
paulsutter 9y ago
Competition is for losers "Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and they're always endlessly disappointing” -Peter Thiel
- mcguire 9y ago
  ..., an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, philanthropist, political activist, and author. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 315 on the Forbes 400 in 2017, with a net worth of $2.6 billion. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel) "There are many different ways to think of failure, most of which seem designed to soften the sting of it. In Courage to Soar, Ms. Biles unpacks her own thoughts on the matter. This memoir, "written" by a 19 year-old and published three months into her explosive post-Olympic popularity, is a pretty blatant cash-grab. Still, the book's purpose, beyond racking up sales, seems to be to inspire younger readers, young girls in particular. But why do we look for advice from the most talented in society? What do they know of our struggles to rise up, dripping and stinking, from the swamp of mediocrity? Here, for example, is Ms. Biles describing how, after some initial struggles, she finally managed to nail a tricky skill – a release move on the uneven bars called a Tkatchev in which you let go of the bar on the upswing and fly backward, usually straddled, over the bar before catching it. "And then, just before practice ended, I said to myself, I'm going to do it this time. And you know what? I actually did!" Must be nice."
- dvtv75 9y ago
  Didn't he just use his status and prestige to buy his way into New Zealand citizenship? (This is a rhetorical question, the answer is "It would seem so.")
  - seem_2211 9y ago
    While Thiel definitely charmed his way into a NZ Citizenship (amazing piece here by the way: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/indepth/national/how-peter-thiel-got-new-zealand-citizenship/ http://www.nzherald.co.nz/indepth/national/how-peter-thiel-g...), I always read his comment more as advice to avoid the traditional Management Consulting / Finance / Law career paths that a lot of Ivy League / Stanford / elite school students end up taking, where they work 70+ hours every week, generally competing for a 5% chance to become a partner 15 years down the track. The payoff isn't great. But the prestige of working at McKinsey / Goldman / Cravath is.
Intrepidy 9y ago
Achilles willingly left Greece, knowing he would die in Troy, so that he could be known as the greatest warrior in history. Alexander the Great supposedly broke down and cried when he felt he had nobody left to overcome. Julius Caesar in turn, after subduing all of Gaul, wept at the feet of Alexander's statue some 200 years later, lamenting that at the age of 38, he had accomplished nothing compared to Alexander. And there are plenty of such examples in non-Western societies where the losers didn't just get a silver medal; but were killed. This story is as old as humanity itself and just as ubiquitous. I think the fashionable, progressive approach to blaming society is wrong in this case. Seeking greatness over peaceful mediocrity may simply be a character 'flaw' in mankind. As such, failure has become one of our signature moves.
- lkrubner 9y ago
  === Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, "Is it not worthy of tears," he said, "that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?" === https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great As to Caesar, Plutarch relates the story of being assigned governor of Iberia at the age of 35. He and his assistants set out to reach the capitol of Iberia. One night, during their journey, they stop in the mountains and make a camp fire. To entertain them, the musician sings a song about Alexander, at which point Caesar begins to cry. His men ask him, why do you cry, my lord? And he answers, how can I ever match a man who did so much, so young, when I myself are already grown so old?
- Spooky23 9y ago
  People like this are usually driven by something missing within. Alexander understood this when he met Diogenes, and went to conquer the earth rather than deal with that. There’s a reason pride is a sin in the Christian tradition. There’s a lesson to be reflect upon in the story of Alexander and Caesar... Ceasar’s conquest of Gaul was complete and epic. He slaughtered and enslaved a statistically significant proportion of the human race. He became rich beyond comprehension and built a legacy admired millennia later. Yet he died stabbed in the back by his friend, still unsatisfied.
currymj 9y ago
i thought the best part of the article was towards the end, where she talks about all the different ways that gymnasts have of redefining success. i think it may be healthy to avoid doing that. like, don't say "well, my company failed, but the important thing is I tried unlike all those losers stuck in 9-5 jobs". or "i didn't get a tenure-track job but really, this job in industry is great and the important thing is my transferable research skills". you still failed, and it's much more dignified to live with it.
deleted 9y ago
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lcc 9y ago
As another washed-up former athlete (one of my old teammates will be playing in PyeongChang any day now), what resonated most with me was how the author grappled with her self-identity after quitting. It is easy to define yourself when you have a concrete goal and can pour all your time, energy, heart and soul into it. And it is devastating when you lose it. It's even harder to redefine yourself when you used to be good at whatever it was you lost, because you know just how much time and effort it took to get there. It can seem impossible to achieve the same level of mastery of anything else. It's been almost 5 years since I quit and, while I've picked up new hobbies that I enjoy, I still haven't found anything that inspires the passion I used to have for my sport.
- rubicon33 9y ago
  If you're interested in changing how you process failure, consider "The Practicing Mind" by Thomas Sterner. A significant personal struggle of mine which I had from a very young age, was a difficulty accepting my own failures and shortcomings. My parents always taught my to shoot for the moon, but never built a mental framework for me of how to process and understand crash landings. This book along with some light additional study of the concept of "The Beginners Mind" has given me such a framework. I no longer struggle with failure. Even past failures which I would carry around with regret and anger, I've been able to re-cast into a different light and move on. Anyways, it's a mental model that worked for me. YMMV.
- mjfl 9y ago
  I spent a good 10 years of my life in a legitimate attempt to become an NFL player. If you saw me, you would have said it was a long shot - of course it was - but I didn't let any of this get to me and I worked extremely hard to get to that goal. But I failed. I started for 3 years on my D3 college football team but at the end of my senior season I was still laughably far from NFL caliber. When I put my pads away for the last time it was devastatingly clear that I had completely wasted on average 20-30 hours every week for the past 10 years of my life, hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person. You know what I did? I moved on, fast. And that is the solution to failure - move on quickly. And I did move on, and have found success after.
vladmk 9y ago
this is a very fluffy peace. First what is success? In what measure? Second "How do we come to terms with failure?" What failure? Whose failure? Everyone has their own, failure isn't a problem that haunts everyone, failure is however someone defines it. My failure isn't your failure.
klum 9y ago
From the article, you get the clear impression that she had a complicated relationship with the sport: she was passionate about it, but afraid of it as well. I can't help but wonder if she would have gotten closer to her goals if she had been able to see things in a less scary light -- by being taught and supported in a more positive way, or something like that. I guess it's down to who you are as a person, but attitudes can be developed in different ways. I wonder if there is a distinction between top performers and mere mortals here -- that the top performers manage to find the love for what they are doing even under intense pressure? And, in that case, which way the causality goes...
totalZero 9y ago
I don't ever want to come to terms with failure. I just want to turn away from it and be so busy that I don't have time to sort it out. Acceptance of failure feels like a form of surrender.

142 points by plg 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

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TL;DR is the author spent years and years of dedicated effort as a gymnast and quit and did not make it to the Olympics. Describes herself as a failure as a gymnast instead of having failed (noun vs verb). And ends the piece with the suggestion that maybe we should all just settle with the knowledge that we will not achieve our dreams. Wow. Granted I read it quickly and maybe missed something. I take a different view. While the goal/dream is admirable, it is the journey that counts. I've been successful in areas, failures in some more, and somewhere in between on others. I've learned and I've grown in each. I've learned more in my failures than in my successes and they helped shape me into who I am. I feel that if you make the best choice you can given the information you have, you've nothing to regret. Strive to be better. Be grateful for what you have. Learn from mistakes. Sometime you'll lose so hard that it is earth shattering. The goal is to be able to pick up the pieces, and keep moving. The most important step you can take is not the first, but the next.

justherefortart 9y ago
I've been failing my entire life. Anytime I'm successful, I move the bar to restart the process of my next failure. I'm very satisfied with my life as I've achieved 10x what I ever thought possible. I'm future failing startup #8 at the moment. It's been dragging out a few years but I'll get there, or fail again! I always looked at failure as a learning process, not a function of who you are. Hell, if you won all the time, it would get boring. So instead of picking easy things so you can always be a winner, I pick things that are beyond my reach (in my estimation) and attempt to achieve those goals. Life is what you make of it, it can be like a rollercoaster at times and a lazy day on the beach at others. My biggest issue in my mid 40s is the "been there done that" attitude. Success isn't a destination IMO, it's a temporary culmination of prior good choices. And it can go away at anytime with as few as one bad decision.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Yea, society is obsessed with the glorification that you get rich quick and achieve success on your first try. Everyone doesn't even talk about how many things they tried to be successful. Or when they were lucky and things just worked out. On the other hand the playing field is not even at all and the luck of being born in a place that is beneficial or to people that have benefits that others don't have is not to be discounted either.
  - justherefortart 9y ago
    Agreed. My father owns his own business. My grandfather helped him after it failed 2-3x. My father however, "did it all by himself". Bootstraps and whatnot. He was lamenting to my brother a few years ago that he has no legacy. Well, you fucked over everyone in your family, including your kids to get yourself ahead. So yeah, you'll die rich and unloved. Surprise outcome!
- mcguire 9y ago
  Could be worse...you could be General Ulysses Grant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant) who was very successful at doing one thing that was vitally important, but only in a limited time and place, and pretty much a failure at everything else he tried.
ataturk 9y ago
First world problems! I competed in two different Olympic sports and although I attended the Junior Olympics for one of the (big whoop, right?) and didn't place, I never once thought I was a loser--you just look at the competition and how a mere few seconds determines the winner versus going home with nothing. People have peak days, others are just a tiny bit off. What I realized is that greatness has a component of luck to it. I figured I was lucky to be able to compete there at all. There are letdowns for sure, but you're not competing with others as much as you are competing with yourself. ETA--Having attended the Olympic Training Center around age 16, I can't tell you how depressing it was to see 20 and 30-something athletes living in the dorms there, striving for their moment of glory while everyone else was out having fun, working, starting families, etc. I look back at that as the moment I made a very conscious choice to focus on having a career. Olympic sports aren't pro sports, you aren't getting endorsement deals unless you're in one of the "popular" sports like swimming or downhill skiing.
- ams6110 9y ago
  I thought this post contributed to the discussion here so I vouched for it. Yes one of the things you hopefully learn in sports is not just teamwork but that you are ultimately trying to be a little bit better every practice, every competition. And that is all on you, and success is measured individually. It's one of the things I like about sports like running, you can always compare your performance with your previous time. Setting a new PR ("personal record") is what you are mostly striving for.
- astura 9y ago
  >I can't tell you how depressing it was to see 20 and 30-something athletes living in the dorms there, striving for their moment of glory while everyone else was out having fun, working, starting families, etc. It might be depressing to YOU because it's not what you'd like for yourself but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's depressing for the people living it, after all, it's what they have chosen. Not everyone is exactly like you and wants the same things in life. I see people living their lives in all sorts of ways I would consider absolutely awful and depressing, but I don't project my values and goals on them.
- 9y ago
whopa 9y ago
> I feel that if you make the best choice you can given the information you have, you've nothing to regret. You did miss something. Trying to be a gymnast wasn't her choice, her mom made that choice for her when she was 3 years old. This is the story of a failure to be elite in the sports world, and coming to terms with a dream that was externally foisted onto her at a formative age that didn't get realized. I don't think this situation applies to the scenarios most HN readers deal with. Your advice is a lot better for this crowd.
- ams6110 9y ago
  This is a big problem in youth sports. Forcing kids to specialize at a very early age. A far better approach is to expose your kids to a variety of sports and let them figure out which ones they like. I do think kids should do sports, the activity is good both physically and mentally, they learn that effort produces results and they learn how to win and lose and move on. And it opens them up to social situations that they will otherwise be completely cut out of. But unless your kid is one of the rare ones who is really athletically gifted, setting up dreams of scholarships and professional careers is just setting them up for failure. You should not even be thinking about that until about middle school age, and only on advice of people who will give you an unbiased evaluation. Johnny may be the best football player on the team and still be absolutely unremarkable for scholarship or professional consideration. Most parents, unless they were elite themselves, don't know enough to judge and certainly are not objective.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    This would probably be best for the kids, but... "...not even be thinking about that until about middle school age..." your kids will never be professional football, baseball, basketball (or soccer, probably) players, or Olympic gymnasts, or classical musicians because they will be competing against people who have been practising since they were three. No matter how much natural gift they have.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Disagree. Professional athletes cannot be made by practice alone. The natural gift, coordination, balance, athletic ability, competitive drive, and other inborn traits are what matters most. There are professional athletes who didn't even seriously play their pro sport until high school, and uncounted thousands of kids who were pushed into something in preschool and never earned a dime from it.
notyourwork 9y ago
You raise a really interesting perspective. I look at this as optimist versus pessimist perspective. Not achieving something can be considered a failure to one person and a learning less to another, glass half empty or full. I have personally struggled with this and it makes me wonder if there is a particular way a child grows up that places them on one side or the other. Is it parenting that creates this perspective or is it life experience as a child such as not getting picked for a team or not being first chair in band. After 30 years of life and achieving what I consider career success I wasn't sure I was capable of I have identified my pessimistic attitude as a fallacy in my personality. Constantly I am trying to change it but it can be really tough to not focus on failure and identify the positive's of events that don't turn out as planned.
darod 9y ago
Success in sports is very different than success in programming. There are very specific events that people have a limited time to train their bodies for so that they peak at the right moments. If you don't do it within that time frame, the opportunity is lost. A programmer doesn't have a comparable definable event and there's no limit to the amount of times you can peak with creating a business outside of dying. All athletes must ultimately redefine themselves, whether as a trainer/coach or move to a completely different industry. When that transition happens they have to live with the result of the investment they made in their athletic careers. A coder can program from childhood to death and never has to redefine themselves outside of learning more languages, frameworks, platforms and that applies to their entire life.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Mostly true, though I've known a few people who realized, after several years, that they were "not cut out" to be programmers. They then had to redefine themselves in that way. But you're right that athletics is unique in that there are a small number of years in which your body and brain are in the right stage of development to achieve peak performance. If you don't achieve your goals in that time, the only consolation you can hope to take away is that you made the effort, and hopefully reached the limits of your capability.
- analyst74 9y ago
  what GP means is not that you are granted success if you keep trying. he/she is saying that the fun is in pursuing something beyond your abilities, knowing there is a good chance you will fail in the end.
aaavl2821 9y ago
I also think that the rewards for success are much more concentrated at the top for professional sports versus other fields. there is a wide spectrum of talent in professional domains, and a wide spectrum of jobs such that even mediocre talent can often get reasonably good jobs. And in many fields, you have decades to build your career and many ways to succeed (versus a short physical prime and one very narrowly defined way to succeed: winning an Olympic medal) I think most elite athletes training for and even competing in the olympics can't sustain themselves financially with their sport. As they get closer to the top they probably get more financial support / prestige, but if you aren't on the medal stand I'm sure much of that comes to a screeching halt
- ams6110 9y ago
  Professional sports is an entertainment business. There isn't much room for mediocre talent: nobody will pay to watch it.
tomrod 9y ago
> Within a millisecond we hear “hey, none of that. We’ve asked you to be respectful.” Absolutely this. Failure is an opportunity to re-evaluate a project, approach, or other categorizable area of effort. It should not be feared. It certainly shouldn't be used to define the character of your life -- as you state, noun versus verb. When failing is a verb, you get a chance to reorganize. To make better. To build opportunity. It's an absolutely exciting time, if you let it be.
mcguire 9y ago
"...spent years and years of dedicated effort as a gymnast and quit and did not make it to the Olympics." IIUC, the author quit because she was reaching puberty and her abilities were in decline, so she would never get any farther---that was why her coach changed her routine, leading to her quitting. That is why she describes herself as a failure---she had a goal, put a great deal of effort into it, and then realized she would never be able to achieve it. It's a part of growing up, realizing that you won't be able to realize some of your goals, either because of factors within you or factors outside your control. And it's probably worse for those like these gymnasts who have invested so much into the attempt. "It is the journey that counts" is a fine response, but it doesn't really help the initial pain.
joe_the_user 9y ago
Well, it that if one is to make the journey worthwhile, one needs to structure the process of an activity so it has value. Learning and enjoying along the way could be a happy accident but I suspect this happy accident was far likely before our society reached the point that it could structure every waking moment of a given person's life with the purpose of reaching a single goal (a description that could apply to 14 year old gymnast, the 20-something entrepreneur or the aging Amazon warehouse worker). There are obvious steps that can be taken here. * Work hard but not so hard you're squeezing the life out of yourself. * Take time to evaluate your success and failure and how much you've progressed * Work on a project that involves other people so you can experience camaraderie in the result. * Think about the "next step" for everyone or a large portion, of those involved. College and graduate have a lot of these qualities, though they seem to be fading over time. Work in a large organization can sometimes have this quality depending on the quality of the organization. Work in startup or as an entrepreneur seems to demand the person or organization can create the qualities themselves. Work for uber or in low-level retail can have none of these qualities and the individuals for it. And in society as a whole, we're suffering for the lack of these things.

everdev 9y ago

Competition is designed to have roles succeed, not people. In business or sport, we want the best to succeed. In that sense competition is a success as long as it's fair. The people or businesses in the competition are essentially replaceable.

mathgeek 9y ago
> In business or sport, we want the best to succeed. This is inaccurate, or at least overly generalized. In both business and sport, many want those who contribute to the health of the field to succeed. Competition is good and drives innovation, whether that's technology or how to hit a baseball consistently.

petra 9y ago

>> Because who I'd be was just another ordinary, mediocre 12-year old girl. I rubbed at the calluses on my hands, sat in front of the TV and felt terrified that I'd never again be good at something. Nothing is scarier than that. To some extent, this is common in th west. But why is this so important to not be ordinary ? Why isn't it good enough to be good at something at your friends group, family, etc ?

manigandham 9y ago
It's not a rule. It's 100% subjective and what's good enough for you is completely different than someone else. Being good at something though usually is built on some kind of goals and purpose which tends to lead to more satisfaction and fulfillment.
im_down_w_otp 9y ago
The thing I've always found fascinating is that this cultural ethos is in direct tension with social organization. Despite this narrative arc of the primacy of individuality we still (quite predictably) shun people who manage to actually achieve it and generally celebrate homogeny among our cohort. I couldn't enumerate the negative effects this inherent contradiction may have produced, but it seems unlikely to be a list of zero length.
VLM 9y ago
Ordinary is no longer economically survivable.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  The problem is that most of us are ordinary by definition. If it's not possible to survive as an ordinary person we have a huge problem.
  - deleted 9y ago
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- cortesoft 9y ago

fullshark 9y ago

Interesting title but this is just an excuse for a long form autobiographical blogpost.

flyinglizard 9y ago

“For most of us, our dreams exceed our limitations, and our ambitions lie far beyond our capabilities“ Not from my experience, no. Most people I know - the vast majority - don’t even try chasing the dreams they have. They are not failing because they’re not even in the game. Most of them do not have ambitions beyond those one degree apart from biological sustenance; they just are.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
There is a difference between not having ambitions and not working towards them. I believe that the latter is the case. Almost everyone wants status, money, and stability, but when someone doesn't believe they are achievable, they won't fight for it.
- flyinglizard 9y ago
  You are of course right, but usually it’s a very weak “want” that doesn’t translate into a process of methodologically driving towards those goals and paying the price they exact.
- tremendulo 9y ago
  True, but those are bad things to want: Status -- those to whom we accord the highest status seem to be people who genuinely don't care about status; Money -- companies which aim only for profit become incapable of change. Presumably something similar applies to individual fat cats; Stability -- societies which aim for stability get wiped out by the next invasion or natural disaster. ...which is perhaps why most people don't work so hard! So what are good things to want?
  - lsc 9y ago
    >Status -- those to whom we accord the highest status seem to be people who genuinely don't care about status; I think you are confusing people who don't care with people who don't seem fearful of losing status. As far as I can see, all "Leaders" are hyperaware of status and spend a lot of time managing their own status and the status of their peers and underlings. As far as I can tell, the further up the chain you go, the more aware you are supposed to be of status, and the more complex the status rituals go, but even at my level (and right now, I'm IT support for an organization of very advanced electrical engineers... so I'm fairly low status, compared to those I work around and compared to other positions I've had) - there are rituals and norms that need to be respected. That said, as far as I can tell, acting fearful (especially acting fearful of losing status) is one of the quickest ways to lose status, so I suppose that could contribute to them looking like they don't care... but from what I've seen, balancing status is a lot of what managers do... maybe most of what they do. And it's a difficult job (and it's super interesting watching someone who used to be technical who get promoted to management try to manage status; they are often a lot more explicit about it than managers who grew up in management, for whom the whole thing looks natural)

nimbius 9y ago

ive always based success on quality of life. For example, I once took the RHCE and failed by just four points. Looking at the cost of the exam at around $400, I decided to forego a retake as a hundred dollars per point seemed silly. What did it mean to me, and my definition of success, to be able to regurgitate old Apache ACL's on command? Not much, seeing as Nginx is of a higher priority to me. In the end I relegated the experience to that of a rat race. Being told you've failed the RHCE hurts but in no way does it mean you should settle with never achieving your dreams. Sometimes you've got to understand who sets the terms and definitions, and make adjustments as necessary. Letting others decide the objectives of success is tacitly hoping their outcomes and objectives for that often very personal success are as altruistic and self serving as yours. At some point, everything from Body Spray to luxury sedans set this bar in a predatory manner. Theres no reason to think the Olympics and private corporations in general wont at some point do this as well.

ghaff 9y ago
In some cases, the certifications associated with some score on a test do matter. It's one thing to pursue a certification, whether some IT certificate or passing the bar, for the learning experience and personal satisfaction. In those cases, it may well indeed make sense to conclude that you came close enough and move onto the next thing. But if you've spent 3 years in law school and really want to become a lawyer, it may well make sense to study harder and try to pass the bar the next time--especially if you didn't fail by much. (Don't actually know how much feedback if you get if you fail.)

shams93 9y ago

You look at the statistics and basically you're largely already born wealthy or you are in poverty especially in California. If you look at social mobility in California it's almost as bad as medieval Europe. The system that enabled hard work to be rewarded is gone. The creative professions that used to be a vehicle for persona wealth are gone. We are living in an era of corporate feudalism where you're either born on top or born to fail but the only question that is relevant today is "who's your daddy?"

magic_beans 9y ago
This comment is completely irrelevant to the article.
- Applejinx 9y ago
  On the contrary, it's got a great deal to do with success and failure, and defines the only reason why such an article is important. If we can't disrupt success… 'move fast and break' success… we're very close to societal collapse. I turned a ten-year software business into a Patreon that gives away free software and is beginning to make it open source, and I feel I'm doing some tangible things to disrupt 'success'. Our sense of value has to be founded on different ground.

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago

What society isn’t obsessed with success? No one wants to fail in hunting, farming, business or anything else.

dvanduzer 9y ago
Some societies seem to focus more on individual success than community survival. I want to live in a society that is obsessed with creating a future where every member can thrive. Canada seems to be working a little harder at this than the United States, but both countries still have frontier culture heavily baked in.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
  I want to live in a society where individual success is the obsession above all else. Society and community is made up of individuals after all.
  - saeranv 9y ago
    This seems a bit simplistic, or I'm not understanding your comment. It is trivial to prove that you have to sometimes deprioritize an individual's success in order to ensure group success. For example, it is beneficial to tax rich individuals to ensure the community has access to a social security safety net. Technically this penalizes a rich individual's success, however it is a critical factor in the success of the group.
- deleted 9y ago
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paganel 9y ago
> No one wants to fail in hunting, farming, business or anything else. The supporters of the football (soccer, for the Americans in here) club that I used to root for ever since I was 9 (I'm now in my late-30s) used to have this wonderful saying: "It's better to hit the post with a beautiful shot than to score an ugly goal". That saying was one of the many reasons why I loved that club, which didn't have that many trophies under its belt. For what is worth, the club has now been dead for 2 years (it was founded in 1923) for financial reasons, so there's also that (it sucks to be a football club nowadays in Eastern Europe). I'm also a Mets supporter, so I guess there's just a cohort of sports fans like me who get attracted to clubs for reasons other than the "obsession to win".

wu-ikkyu 9y ago

By not idolizing/worshipping arbitrary measures of success (money, popularity) in the first place

vanillaboy 9y ago

> How do we come to terms with failure? To start, by not posting humblebrags a la "I was a world-class gymnast but...", "I failed that one time but I learned a lot check out my...".

keenmaster 9y ago

There are so many domains where you can achieve success or mastery so I just don’t buy the central message here. I think most people can be very successful in multiple domains, it’s just a matter of finding them and working hard enough. Gymnastics is an unfortunate thing to fail at since it’s a big commitment. Maybe that’s why the author was rendered cynical/defeated.

cryptica 9y ago
Pick any given field these days and you'll immediately be competing with millions of other talented people. Some of them have been doing it since they were children. There aren't many careers that you can change into and succeed. It's very rare nowadays and it's getter rarer because capital is becoming increasingly concentrated and knowledge is becoming increasingly specialised. The playing field is global now. Even if you want to do something as mundane as open a local retail outlet, now you have to compete with giants like Amazon who use profits from their monopolies in other industries to bleed you dry. The most important financial decision you can make in life is having the right parents. Second is marrying the right person. What you call cynicism is actually realism. You're the optimist. The fact that you have this world view suggests that either you were born into a well-off family or you got very lucky at some point in your life. In the same way that one wrong move can kill you in a second, it only takes a single stroke of luck to set you on a lifelong winning streak... Unfortunately, bad luck is the norm for most people. While it's true that the harder you work, the luckier you get, when your luck starts in the negatives, it can take a lifetime just to bring it to 0.

paulsutter 9y ago

Competition is for losers "Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and they're always endlessly disappointing” -Peter Thiel

mcguire 9y ago
..., an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, philanthropist, political activist, and author. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 315 on the Forbes 400 in 2017, with a net worth of $2.6 billion. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel) "There are many different ways to think of failure, most of which seem designed to soften the sting of it. In Courage to Soar, Ms. Biles unpacks her own thoughts on the matter. This memoir, "written" by a 19 year-old and published three months into her explosive post-Olympic popularity, is a pretty blatant cash-grab. Still, the book's purpose, beyond racking up sales, seems to be to inspire younger readers, young girls in particular. But why do we look for advice from the most talented in society? What do they know of our struggles to rise up, dripping and stinking, from the swamp of mediocrity? Here, for example, is Ms. Biles describing how, after some initial struggles, she finally managed to nail a tricky skill – a release move on the uneven bars called a Tkatchev in which you let go of the bar on the upswing and fly backward, usually straddled, over the bar before catching it. "And then, just before practice ended, I said to myself, I'm going to do it this time. And you know what? I actually did!" Must be nice."
dvtv75 9y ago
Didn't he just use his status and prestige to buy his way into New Zealand citizenship? (This is a rhetorical question, the answer is "It would seem so.")
- seem_2211 9y ago
  While Thiel definitely charmed his way into a NZ Citizenship (amazing piece here by the way: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/indepth/national/how-peter-thiel-got-new-zealand-citizenship/ http://www.nzherald.co.nz/indepth/national/how-peter-thiel-g...), I always read his comment more as advice to avoid the traditional Management Consulting / Finance / Law career paths that a lot of Ivy League / Stanford / elite school students end up taking, where they work 70+ hours every week, generally competing for a 5% chance to become a partner 15 years down the track. The payoff isn't great. But the prestige of working at McKinsey / Goldman / Cravath is.

Intrepidy 9y ago

Achilles willingly left Greece, knowing he would die in Troy, so that he could be known as the greatest warrior in history. Alexander the Great supposedly broke down and cried when he felt he had nobody left to overcome. Julius Caesar in turn, after subduing all of Gaul, wept at the feet of Alexander's statue some 200 years later, lamenting that at the age of 38, he had accomplished nothing compared to Alexander. And there are plenty of such examples in non-Western societies where the losers didn't just get a silver medal; but were killed. This story is as old as humanity itself and just as ubiquitous. I think the fashionable, progressive approach to blaming society is wrong in this case. Seeking greatness over peaceful mediocrity may simply be a character 'flaw' in mankind. As such, failure has become one of our signature moves.

lkrubner 9y ago
=== Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, "Is it not worthy of tears," he said, "that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?" === https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great As to Caesar, Plutarch relates the story of being assigned governor of Iberia at the age of 35. He and his assistants set out to reach the capitol of Iberia. One night, during their journey, they stop in the mountains and make a camp fire. To entertain them, the musician sings a song about Alexander, at which point Caesar begins to cry. His men ask him, why do you cry, my lord? And he answers, how can I ever match a man who did so much, so young, when I myself are already grown so old?
Spooky23 9y ago
People like this are usually driven by something missing within. Alexander understood this when he met Diogenes, and went to conquer the earth rather than deal with that. There’s a reason pride is a sin in the Christian tradition. There’s a lesson to be reflect upon in the story of Alexander and Caesar... Ceasar’s conquest of Gaul was complete and epic. He slaughtered and enslaved a statistically significant proportion of the human race. He became rich beyond comprehension and built a legacy admired millennia later. Yet he died stabbed in the back by his friend, still unsatisfied.

currymj 9y ago

i thought the best part of the article was towards the end, where she talks about all the different ways that gymnasts have of redefining success. i think it may be healthy to avoid doing that. like, don't say "well, my company failed, but the important thing is I tried unlike all those losers stuck in 9-5 jobs". or "i didn't get a tenure-track job but really, this job in industry is great and the important thing is my transferable research skills". you still failed, and it's much more dignified to live with it.

deleted 9y ago

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lcc 9y ago

As another washed-up former athlete (one of my old teammates will be playing in PyeongChang any day now), what resonated most with me was how the author grappled with her self-identity after quitting. It is easy to define yourself when you have a concrete goal and can pour all your time, energy, heart and soul into it. And it is devastating when you lose it. It's even harder to redefine yourself when you used to be good at whatever it was you lost, because you know just how much time and effort it took to get there. It can seem impossible to achieve the same level of mastery of anything else. It's been almost 5 years since I quit and, while I've picked up new hobbies that I enjoy, I still haven't found anything that inspires the passion I used to have for my sport.

rubicon33 9y ago
If you're interested in changing how you process failure, consider "The Practicing Mind" by Thomas Sterner. A significant personal struggle of mine which I had from a very young age, was a difficulty accepting my own failures and shortcomings. My parents always taught my to shoot for the moon, but never built a mental framework for me of how to process and understand crash landings. This book along with some light additional study of the concept of "The Beginners Mind" has given me such a framework. I no longer struggle with failure. Even past failures which I would carry around with regret and anger, I've been able to re-cast into a different light and move on. Anyways, it's a mental model that worked for me. YMMV.
mjfl 9y ago
I spent a good 10 years of my life in a legitimate attempt to become an NFL player. If you saw me, you would have said it was a long shot - of course it was - but I didn't let any of this get to me and I worked extremely hard to get to that goal. But I failed. I started for 3 years on my D3 college football team but at the end of my senior season I was still laughably far from NFL caliber. When I put my pads away for the last time it was devastatingly clear that I had completely wasted on average 20-30 hours every week for the past 10 years of my life, hours I could have spent making friends and/or becoming a normal person. You know what I did? I moved on, fast. And that is the solution to failure - move on quickly. And I did move on, and have found success after.

vladmk 9y ago

this is a very fluffy peace. First what is success? In what measure? Second "How do we come to terms with failure?" What failure? Whose failure? Everyone has their own, failure isn't a problem that haunts everyone, failure is however someone defines it. My failure isn't your failure.

klum 9y ago

From the article, you get the clear impression that she had a complicated relationship with the sport: she was passionate about it, but afraid of it as well. I can't help but wonder if she would have gotten closer to her goals if she had been able to see things in a less scary light -- by being taught and supported in a more positive way, or something like that. I guess it's down to who you are as a person, but attitudes can be developed in different ways. I wonder if there is a distinction between top performers and mere mortals here -- that the top performers manage to find the love for what they are doing even under intense pressure? And, in that case, which way the causality goes...

totalZero 9y ago

I don't ever want to come to terms with failure. I just want to turn away from it and be so busy that I don't have time to sort it out. Acceptance of failure feels like a form of surrender.