
Lose and You’ll Win – How to Reflect on Failure - kelvinp
https://theascent.pub/lose-and-youll-win-how-to-reflect-on-failure-47657d42e0dd
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rdiddly
Time for the Ceramics Class Anecdote: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-
always-trumps-quality](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.

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cle
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.

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majkinetor
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.

~~~
eswat
> 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.

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cbanek
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...](https://toughnickel.com/personal-finance/Robert-Kiyosaki-May-Not-Be-
the-Financial-Genius-You-Think-He-Is) )

------
jaden
> 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.

~~~
phkahler
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.

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tomohawk
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.

~~~
jwagenet
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?

~~~
tracer4201
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.

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DVassallo
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).

