Tom Robbins on Failure | Hacker News Reader

Tom Robbins on Failure

8 pointsshikhar5 comments

So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all, you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.

~ Tom Robbins

View on HN

Good stuff.

I've been meaning to write about how ass-backwards our school system is for punishing failure rather severely rather than embracing convergence.

Story Time:

When I taught calculus I, I had a student that did terribly on the first two tests. With my help and a lot of tutoring from my end, he brought his grade up on the third test to a C and his final was a B.

If I had taken the average and followed instructions from the course coordinater, then I would had to have given him a D in the course which would have fucked him over.

But, I gave him an A.

When he took Calculus 2 in the next semester, he got high A's all by himself.

Loving failure is a big part of education.

It sounds like he deserved a C+ or perhaps a B-, which would have been fair and wouldn't have done any serious damage.

I don't think history matters, I think what you are going to do matters. Before I gave him the A, I asked myself:

How well does he know it?

Does he have the tools to know it?

I concluded that he would do well if he had confidence in himself, so I gave him the grade I thought would do him best. Now he has a math degree.

Students grades as predictors of life is too much pressure and forces an unhealthy fear of failure.

I'm not sure if I just had an epiphany, but I just sort of got lost in the thought of how our survival instinct prevents us from realizing our full potential.

Good quote, thanks for sharing.

Statistically, we are all failures, out to 6 sigma. [1]

The next step is to get a certain 1950's classic about humans' use of statistics.

[1] (Stated off the cuff and not scientifically.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com