I am writing today’s essay for myself.
I’m not really sure this will resonate with anyone but it feels like something that helps me capture my mental state over the last few weeks, as crystalized by my lived experience over the last few years.
We hear so many things about failure. That it builds character. That it’s essential to innovation. That every no brings you closer to a yes. But the reality I’ve come to find is none of that matters when you’re in the thick of it. When your project collapses. When you miscalculate. When you make the same mistakes multiple times. When your best wasn’t enough. It’s one thing to intellectually know that failure is part of the process. It’s another thing entirely to live through it and still choose to get back up.
To be honest, it’s not easy to avoid blaming yourself. In fact, maybe it’s even right to. Especially when the failure isn’t random or unfair; when you know exactly how you contributed to it. And you can look back in time with the experience of hindsight and identify clearly foolish decisions. You didn’t follow through. You ignored a red flag. You got careless. You got lazy. Or maybe you just weren’t good enough, at least not yet. There’s a story we tell about learning from our mistakes, but it doesn’t capture the loop. Because in real life, you don’t fail once, blame yourself, and reset. You fail, blame, fail again, and blame even more.
Self-blame compounds. It accrues like interest on a bad loan.
And that’s just one layer. There is the longer-term psychological effect. Failure distorts your inner model of what’s possible. Your self-esteem gets nicked. Your sense of control starts to erode. You become more conservative, less imaginative, more afraid. The cost of risk begins to feel existential. Not because you’re scared of the external outcome, but because failure has started to bleed into how you see yourself.
It’s worse when you’re a slow learner. Sometimes, you repeat the same mistakes, not because you’re dumb, but because some learnings refuse to land on the first try. Or the second. Or the third. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes your whole nervous system has to be re-trained. And that process hurts. I’ve come to believe that this is just how human learning works. We don’t get truths by hearing them once. We get them by iteration. By reinforcement. By slowly letting new patterns override old ones. The tragedy is that failure often outpaces learning. The test comes before mastery. The regret comes before the rewiring.
Yet another thing about failure in the context of how we process it in society is that it’s littered by survivorship bias. The story we love to tell: the one about the person who fails, fails, fails, and then finally breaks through. That’s real. But it’s also not really the norm. The other story is: someone fails, and keeps failing, and never quite makes it. And they die failing.
The problem is: you can’t tell which story you’re in while you’re living it.
And that uncertainty? That’s the price of admission. The true cost of risk-taking isn’t just one big brave leap. It’s waking up again and again in uncertainty. With no guarantees. No clear payoff. And choosing to keep going anyway.
So why do it?
There’s only one answer I’ve found that holds: purpose.
You have to be so obsessed, so consecrated, so irrationally committed to what you believe you’re here to do, that you’re willing to pay the cost. Even if it never gets easy. Even if it never gets seen. Even if the failure doesn’t end in triumph.
You have to choose the mission over the success. The battle over winning. The next experiment over the last embarrassment. Because the only thing worse than failing is not trying at all. And cowardice is not an option
We glamorize the survivors. But most people don’t get that arc. They don’t get to tie the pain into a neat bow. Some people fail and disappear. Some people never recover. Some people stop believing.
Life is not a series of failures that culminate in success. It’s a bombardment of failures with intermittent success. That’s the terrain. That’s the game. Accept it. Don’t flinch. Don’t run. You’re going to mess up again. You’re going to forget what you’ve already learned. You’re going to think you’ve healed, and then find another wound underneath.
But get up anyway.
Again. And again. And again.
Because maybe that’s the whole point.
Back to code!