What does it mean to fail?
A business? A relationship? exam? Let’s just say the more you experience this feeling, the more it becomes ambiguous to answer. Perhaps failure never actually exist; it’s just a form of learning, but in the most truthful version.
Months of dopamine frying, is how it became apparent the phone and any form of scrolling had to go for sure. The excuse is “conducting market research”. In other words, a bubonic illness towards content consumption.
But it's not just fried neuron receptors; it’s also paired with the lack of intrinsically valuing the work neccessary, naively believing what is being worked on is low priority, thus subconsciously weakening the inclination toward focus.
But that’s incorrect. The whole point is to consistently challenge yourself. Do what is needed, regardless of the way you feel. What’s the point of SEALs carrying enormous logs up and down and practicing coming close to death? Just for fun, of course…
Yea don’t think so. It’s precisely purposeful.
Conditioning of the self is the valuable lesson to take away here. For example, going to the gym when you feel like it and working on what feels good, has nothing to do with discipline—one of many hard pills for me to swallow.
The prereq’s for discipline are doing tasks necessary for growth, and yet wishing to put off--showing up when you least want to. The gym task here might be: single-leg bulgarian split squats. Done correctly under proper time under tension–-it’s supposed to make you cry, and that’s precisely why it’s good for quad development.
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Unfortunately, it’s taken me far too long to realize these same principle applies to all vertices of life. In the question of problems, if it’s not making you frustrated working on it, you likely aren’t growing from it.
Perhaps failing at anything is a gift from God. Like a form of feedback for your behaviour. Not just “rejection is redirection”, but literally the universe is trying to tell you something.
If astrology and stars are fake, failing at something is probably the closest to real astrology;
It’s a damn sign of something.
A victory doesn’t compose nearly as much learning. It’s quite low signal if anything, you can realistically conclude to “continue doing what is working” and “good job team”. This may be best understood from any game. A sport perhaps.
There is not much to self–analyze when your team is doing everything and you have minimal contribution. It’s only the games where tough situations are encountered and you do lose, that in your performance review, there could be a lot to unpack about what went wrong.
The epitome of losers here would be any players to blame teammates. In life, that could manifest as claiming the market is rough, society is unfair, the system is xyz, etc. It is just completely irrelevant since it’s not in the player’s scope.
If you do “improve” by simply having good teammates, getting lucky, by being in a bull market, you’ve not improved anywhere and it says nothing. Just like, “any investor thinks they are competent in a bull market”. Then you were not the win condition to begin with.
Circumstances don’t define the player, they only reveal them [Epictetus]; and the card delt also don’t define who you are. Winning with a bad team, making good decisions under poor conditions, and redefining what the cards mean to you, are higher signals.
Every player is different, and so are people. Which is why comparing yourself is likely to be counter–productive; Do you know who you are, and are you able to grow?
In essence, failing might just be the best thing that will ever happen to you.
If you die tomorrow, perhaps that’s defeat.
Since there’s a tomorrow, failure is a blessing.