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

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.

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.

As a chess master I am blessed and cursed with something that I can play at a reasonably high level until old age while watching my skills slowly yet surely decline.

At age 40+ you realize that you will not be really good at anything you start learning from ground zero.

Whatever seeds you planted at an early age are the ones you have to grow.

So the only answer to improving at an older age is MU. Just set aside your competitiveness and enjoy the occasional break from mediocrity.

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?

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.

And all those charesteristics describe the hunter-gatherer era, the era that supposedly shaped human psychology.

But if you look at what happens today, western society is organized around the exact opposites of those things. So it would be weird if we didn't raise questions about that.

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.

Common in the east too. I would imagine this is common to all human(living?) beings.

I had 2 of my classmates commit suicide because they didn't achieve success at engineering entrance exam.

Its one of the most vivid memories I have from my teens. I walked into our hostel and there he was lying in his bed with half eaten apple in his mouth. I think he tried to eat something sweet after downing chemical pesticide.

Knowing all this, how could I throw it all away? I have no delusions of being the next Elon Musk, but I have the opportunity to work myself into the top 10% of what I do. Never mind my own internal drive (I honestly love building things, in general), but to be handed all of that opportunity and just throw it out for a mediocre career doing mediocre things would be a tacit insult to everyone who has less than me; and might do more than me given the same opportunities. Put succinctly, it would be lazy and ungrateful of me to just "settle down".

Granted I started off closer to the top than most, but I imagine many people have a similar ideal relative to their starting point. Just look at immigrant families who arrived with nothing, re-use disposable plastic bags and wear the same t-shirts for years to save for their kids' college, and said kids go on to get get high-paying jobs. Accepting the "ordinary" in that context means the family remains poor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

"For many of us – most of us who have devoted ourselves to the pursuit of any kind of excellence – our dreams already exceed our limitations; our ambitions lie far beyond our capabilities. So necessarily, most of us are doomed to fail."

The author is not talking about all people. She is talking about people who have devoted their lives to perusing their dreams.

People who start their own companies and get a solid start should, at the very least, pat themselves on the back, no matter what happens. Then it obviously takes more a lot on top of that to actually make it actually succeed.

It is a very tough moment in one's life - in a relation or in a project or any hobby - to admit to yourself - this has f*(#ing fallen apart. What I/we've built is not working. I'm not the best and I've hit my peak at this. I have to wind this down, give up, move on - or if I persist, am I psychotic or will it pay off eventually? What now? How do you want a newspaper article or a wikipedia page about you to read?

Or - find a nice career path, go to work, hope you find a nice girl, maybe get a promotion, have a family and a lot of friends. Life!

And then he discovered that the world is not a kind place; it puts down immovable barriers against those plans. He has a friend who says, "anything good that happened was because I beat my head against a stone wall until I succeeded;" not this guy---anything good that happens seems basically pure luck, head banging or no head banging.

He discovered that those goals he did work for and achieve suddenly tasted like sand. And then one day he realized that the reason he would never achieve any of those great dreams was because the will to work for them had been beaten out.

Yeah, I could tell you a story. But I won't.

This is smart, because pursing some dreams could ruin you financially if it ultimately doesn't result in a paycheck. Your starting place in life has a big influence on how far your efforts will get you.

So I'm glad they don't recklessly try, because trying to accomplish a dream and failing doesn't keep you fed or warm or dry.

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.

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.

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".

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.)

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.

"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."