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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 gym

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.

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.