The only time you truly fail is when you give up prematurely.
Every Chess Grandmaster has lost more games than the average person has played.
You rarely succeed without failure.
Failure is a chance to learn. Why did you fail? How could you improve? How could you fix the problem even after failing? How could you ensure you don’t fail again?
These are all things you typically can’t learn until you fail and have to answer these questions.
I fail at things everyday. But because I’ve failed so many times with so many things I know how to fix things or how to set myself up so failure isn’t possible.
Go out and take a coffee.
If you twist yourself into knots due to “failure” you essentially break the learning mechanism in your head.
Often this is due to shit parenting where your parent teaches you ideas of what success and failure are that don’t align with the real world. They burden your immature mind with fear, pain, and guilt, usually for trivial failures. Usually because they have their own baggage they never examined.
But some people accidentally do it to themselves, too, even if their parents didn’t go hogwild on the shame, guilt, and punishment game if they “failed” something.
Anyway … learning from experiences is a human superpower. When you get all freaked out about failure you basically cut out of yourself the mechanism humans use to be smarter than animals. Because you stop putting yourself in any positions where you might be challenged. You close your eyes to experiences where you might learn because you got too conditioned to fear feeling bad things if you “fail”. So you start to lose access to the rewards of trying, failing, and LEARNING from that failure in a way no book can teach you. The fear or failure gets in the way of your ability to learn, and that’s awful.
Learn from your failures, don’t lobotomize yourself with fear and guilt (as if failure is an express pass straight to hell that will damn you forever or something.)
And if you don’t know how to chill out with yourself yet, learning how to chill, maybe with therapy, or maybe by doing a lot of introspection, should be your number one priority. Life gets so much easier once you can roll with the punches instead of carrying a millstone of fear on your back every waking moment.
(Why yes, I have strong feelings about how having a fucked up mindset about failing can cripple one’s ability to learn…why do you ask? Lol)
I think about what I could’ve done better, and figure out how I’ll avoid the same problems when I try again.
I don’t. I embrace it, learn from it, beat myself up for it and try to do better.
How do you embrace something that hurts you?
Avoiding the pain and humiliation doesn’t make it go away. Realize that by doing that it will be with you the rest of your life.
The only way to make it fade is to face it, embrace it, admit it, and experience it, with an eye toward learning from it. Then, you can put it behind you. Your mind is trying to do the right thing for you, that’s why it’s nagging you to face it.
You do it by stopping resisting.
A failure, or mistake, is only a mistake if you dont learn from it!
My friend loves this saying: An experience doesn’t have to be nice, as long as it’s intense. I kind of hate when he says it. But at times of hurting, I remember, and it makes me go all ironic and sarcastic and I become able to find dark humour and absurdity in the situation. And that allows me to appreciate that my life is rich and colourful, even if it’s not always positive. It gives me stories to tell.
No sweet without bitter, light without dark, etc. The intensity rather than quality of an experience is what engages us. Contrast between cat pics and war crimes makes your feed hit harder
Just don’t try to avoid it or look for distractions. Pain, discomfort, sadness, all the negative emotions are still part of the human experience, those do serve a purpose.
Just experience it, sit with it, eventually the brain gets used to it and stops looking for distractions from it. Kinda like exposure therapy.Of course it’s easier said than done.
Read up on “equanimity”. It’s been a thing for thousands of years. Lots of mediation, buddhist, Taoist traditions etc cover it.
Ask porcupine lovers.
Most of the time I really enjoy being alive, beyond that there is no failure.
Don’t. Failure is how you learn. You’re going to fuck up often, get used to it and use it. Don’t let it control you.
Learn and move on
I take notes and have discussions with my partners; often we try to diagnose what may have happened, and try to make them lessons-learned from future endeavors.
Recalibrate your thought process.
Life isn’t a game even if too many people treat it as such. There are no winners or losers. Broad ideas of “success” and “failure” are social constructs, almost always tied to artificial things like money and status. You don’t have to care about these things at all. You can simply unsubscribe from that ideology. All we need to do is live, and all we should want is to thrive.
When it comes to failing to meet personal goals, it’s better to think of your progress and establish milestones.
Imagine a person learning to skateboard with a goal of doing a kickflip, how many times do you think that they will need to fail at the trick before successfully landing it the first time? Even after they land it once, what will their success ratio be for that trick over the next 6 months? Anyone who has tried skateboarding knows that it’s hard, and that you have to be mentally and physically prepared to fall and maybe get hurt, because “failure” is just part of the learning process.
to a typical person failure is the best teacher. it shows you what you did wrong and you figure out why it didn’t work.
there’s a quote supposedly by Thomas Edison that’s fitting for your question.
I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.
point is, you never truly fail as long as you learned something.
however, people with high anxiety may not feel the same way because they’re too focused on results over experience. to them my best advice is this; get medicated. I say this as a medicated anxious person. if that’s not possible for you, learning from your failures will take more effort.
it helped me to write my failures out, one sheet of paper only. discuss the points with myself as if I was talking to a person on the sheet of paper. discuss what I did wrong and next steps to resolve the problem. once I was done, I burned the paper. While burning it I envisioned all the failure burning with it along with all the stress and anxiety. this gave me control over the failure and the outcome of the failure and allowed me to take the next steps to resolve it as I had discussed on the paper.
I read a book for a bit and pet my cat.
by learning from it and trying a different tack
When you never succeed you don’t know the difference.
