Lose and You’ll Win – How to Reflect on Failure | Hacker News Reader

Lose and You’ll Win – How to Reflect on Failure

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63 pointskelvinp16 comments

Time for the Ceramics Class Anecdote: https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality

There's nothing magical about failure itself; it's the experience. Experience comes from the same root word as experiment. Just looked up the etymology in fact, and here are a few more: empirical; expert; peril; and interestingly, pirate.

In some way maybe you've already been suckered if you impose the win/loss template on things prematurely. Experiments have results; that's about as neutral as you can state it. Take them as they come, and absorb the lessons. If your goal consists of something very specific, as all well-chosen goals do, you'll find that the conditions that lead to that condition are also very specific. But in the meantime, even a null result is a result.

I find this to be throwing around pretty shallow platitudes. Winning/losing is not binary, it is a continuum. There are degrees of losing. If you lose hard enough, you will not be able to leverage it for a win later. And you might also ruin the lives of people around you, or people who depend on you.

Yes, there are valuable lessons to be learned in failure. But you have to balance that with not failing too hard or too often. At some point it starts working against you.

Mhm...

I wonder what is the acceptable threshold for that, which once you cross you actually become the person with unacceptably low level of self confidence.

In animal world, losing a battle has long lasting detrimental effects on self confidence and accepting subordinate status is often the end result. It probably applies to humans as well in some measure.

That might mean there is either a threshold or milestone events which can turn the 'lose and you'll win' into 'lose and you'll more likely lose in the future'.

It might be that humans have many competitive domains, unlike animals, where each loser can start it again from the 0 and start rebuilding confidence.

> In animal world, losing a battle has long lasting detrimental effects on self confidence and accepting subordinate status is often the end result. It probably applies to humans as well in some measure.

We were in the same boat for a long time. But many of us have been long in an era where making mistakes is far less costly. But it’s also very difficult for the animalistic part of our brains to realize this and the threshold of failure seems far lower because of this.

It may be just a matter of framing. That's one huge advantage people have over animals. If you don't view the loss as a loss but as a necessary step to winning, does it have the same psychological and physiological effect?

This seems like the current SV spin on losing ("failure = pre-greatness"). It seems like he's specifically saying that losing helps you win, or losing will inspire you to win, or whatever. But really, it seems like the key is learning from your mistakes (and we make mistakes in failure, and in success). You can still succeed and improve and succeed more later on.

I get the feeling that couching things in terms of failure let's everyone feel they can do it. I failed at so many things today. I fail at things everyday. And now failing is how to win. Great.

It's a lot harder when relating to learning, because it seems so much harder and fewer people seem to do it on a daily basis. If I rewrote this and said "learn and you'll win," it'd be completely obvious.

All that being said, you can fail all the time, but if you never learn, and repeat the same mistakes, you won't win.

(Although I must admit, my BS radar beeped at the first quote of Rich Dad, Poor Dad: https://toughnickel.com/personal-finance/Robert-Kiyosaki-May... )

> But I keep going. Losing inspires me to do better next time.

There's a balance between continuing to lose versus trying something else. And survivorship bias makes it hard to know if you should be inspired by the quotes of those who won. It's possible for every success there are 100x more people who are failing in obscurity.

The author does say to ask yourself what things are safe to lose. In other words, practice losing safely, or safely enough. The mental lessons are deeper than simply learning to take risks.

If you get to the end of your career and have never lost, its likely you didn't try hard enough or challenge yourself enough.

Or that you learned from each success and managed to compound them with enough momentum that nothing could stop you from succeeding more.

That strikes me as requiring a great deal of luck. By it's very nature, growth means expanding into the unknown.

Great deal of luck and intelligence.

Why is losing/failing in your career necessary? Is it not enough to play it safe in your career and take on challenges in relationships, hobbies, or other parts of life?

I don’t think it’s necessary to lose or fail in your career. However, there’s also something to consider - if you always succeed at everything, are you really being challenged? There’s a difference between always succeeding because you’re in your comfort zone or working on problems that don’t stretch you. For some folks, that’s probably fine. Depending on your line of work, it may not be enough if you really want to grow. Just my 2 cents.

Our VP of Sales has an interesting reaction to every large deal won: "We could have asked for more"

Winning (i.e. meeting the stated goal) every time means that the boundaries of what is possible haven't been explored.

I find that the key to risk taking is to separate the things you can't afford losing from the things you're okay risking. And if by habit you always categorize any undesirable outcome (i.e. failure) in the first category, you'd never expose yourself to the upside of risk taking.

To win by losing, you first have to insulate yourself from losing. When losing is fatal to further attempts (russian roulette, financial ruin, etc) it's probably not worth participating. But it's important to distinguish between truly consequential outcomes from other failures that merely harm things you're okay losing (time, some money, some reputation, career status, ego, etc).

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