SOLVED with Mark Manson - Failure, Solved

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Fail fast. Fail forward. Fail better. As a society, we’ve turned failure into a slogan to celebrate, but somehow we’re more afraid of it than ever. So what's going on? Most of us say failure is our best teacher, but I doubt many of you have ever walked away from a failure doing a happy dance. IInstead, you probably let the moment rattle around in your head at some ungodly hour, then played it a little safer the next time. Don't worry, you're not the only one. Today, Drew and I break down why every piece of advice you've ever received about failure has, well… failed you. We cover why indulging in "failure porn" is such a harmful move and what it actually takes to learn from our mistakes (it's not what you think). We explain the evolutionary reason a rejected email can feel threatening. We tell the story of how a country's inability to admit failure got thousands killed, and of a monk so tormented by his failures that he confessed them for six hours a day. We dive into the three different kinds of failure and why the setback itself matters less than the actions you take after. And we even discuss when quitting is and isn't a failure, and the five-question test that reveals the difference. Apologies in advance: this episode will not teach you how to avoid failure. On a long enough timeline, the failure rate of everything is 100%. So let's get really great at failing. Get your free episode guide: https://mrk.mn/failureguide CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: The Failure to Understand Failure 00:01:15 Chapter 1: The Most Overdone Topic in Self-Help 00:07:39 The Failure Porn Industrial Complex 00:16:06 Why Failure Worship Made Everything Worse 00:41:47 Chapter 2: Why Failure Hurts So Much 01:02:35 The Sociometer Theory: Your Brain's Status-Tracking System 01:14:28 The Ego, Original Sin, and Why You Can't Escape Failure 01:31:57 Chapter 3: When You Define Yourself, You Define Your Failures 02:07:08 Confession, Therapy, and the Technology of Atonement 02:23:48 Chapter 4: Andre Agassi and the Two Types of Failure 02:30:00 Guilt vs. Shame: Converting Your Pain Into Growth 03:04:36 Chapter 5: Amy Edmondson and the Three Types of Failures 03:19:46 The Science of Learning From Failure: Dosage, Recovery, and Extraction 03:30:37 When to Quit: The Five Questions That Reveal If You're Being Smart or Just Scared 03:38:53 Closing Thoughts: Choosing Your Failures Wisely ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠

You know, Drew, usually we do some sort of cold open to these episodes, but I failed to think of one. That's a scary. We're getting kind of a trend. These like little meta cold open. Yeah. So we had, when you failed already, I'm just before we've even started. I'm just trying to be clever. We can't commit to a studio space.

We had commitment last week or last month. Fortunately, we're lucky that we have such a great show. Well, you remember all the bad luck we had during that show. Well, yeah, that's true. Good luck, too. That is true. good luck. The change episode, God. Did you change? Well, that's... I have not changed. Well, I'm definitely the same. I mean, we can get into that, but yeah. For another podcast.

I'm a little bit afraid of this one then. If it says, this is failure. We're talking about failure today. Yes. Okay. What's going to happen? I'm pretty sure whatever happens, it's not going to be my fault, and I'm going to learn nothing from it. You better listen to this episode then. That's... Okay. Should I? You probably should. Okay. Okay. That's actually what most people do is they learn nothing. That's right. Let's learn something. Okay.

Yeah. Let's try to learn something. Without further ado, I'm going to read this intro that you put together and hope it doesn't fail spectacularly. You know the quotes. You could recite them in your sleep. Edison and his 10,000 light bulbs. Michael Jordan cut from his high school team, fail forward, fail fast. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger?

you've probably reposted one of these at some point on your Instagram. That's a little too close to home, Drew. You may even have one on a coffee mug that I don't have. You tell your friends that failure is your best teacher. You tell your kids that mistakes are how we learn. You believe it. You would swear on it. So here's the question.

The last time you actually failed, really failed at something. Take a moment. Think about it. Something that you cared about. You failed in front of people whose opinion mattered to you. What did you actually do in that situation if you're being honest? Because if you are being honest, you probably didn't immediately extract the lesson. You didn't find the silver lining.

You probably minimized it in the retelling. You built a version of the story for yourself where the market shifted or the timing was off or the other person screwed up and dropped the ball. You probably went a little quiet in the group chat. You checked days later whether anyone was still thinking about it, and somewhere, without ever really realizing it or announcing it to yourself, you made the next bet a little bit smaller as a result. You resized your ambition so that that particular flavor of pain would never find you again. And at some point, at some ungodly hour of the night, you probably replayed it.

The failure, I mean, not the lesson. On a loop, your body reacting like something was actually wrong. wrong, obsessing over an email, a failed pitch, a faulty launch, a sentence you said three years ago that nobody else remembers. That gap between everything you believe about failure and everything you actually do when it shows up, that's not hypocrisy. It's not weakness. It's not an error. It is actually just a very human mechanism. And nobody has actually honestly explained it to you. Because here's the spicy take that Drew and I have learned from researching this episode. The entire modern conversation around failure is cope. The old culture that shames failure,

well, it was always lying to you. It doesn't really matter that much. But the new culture that worships failure, it's running the exact same line in reverse. And for once, we don't have to argue about this philosophically. We can just check. Because as always, The Solve Podcast brings the receipts. Because over the last two decades, that failure worship went fully mainstream, the conferences, the mantras, the keynotes, the measured share of people who are too afraid to fail to even try something rose by almost 50%. Perfectionism, tracked across three decades and the exact country's preaching, embracing failure the loudest,

hit the highest levels ever recorded. And in the lab, researchers can now watch in real time the human mind refurb. to learn from its own mistakes. The single most repeated piece of advice and self-help grow from your failures turns out to be incredibly difficult for us to do. So today, we're going to break down all of the reasons why we both worship and shame our failures, both in ourselves and in other people. We're going to talk about how to actually learn from our failures, and it's really not

as simple as you think. And along the way, we're also going to tell you a story about a conference founded to celebrate failure, that, spoiler alert, ended up failing. We're going to talk about the two psychologists who drafted the most important theory of loss from a Jeep in an active war zone, while their own country's inability to admit failure got thousands of people killed around them. We're going to talk about the evolutionary reason. A rejected email can produce the same physiological response as a threat to your life. We'll discuss a monk so tormented by his failures that he confessed them for six hours a day, until

His confessors had to start avoiding him, and whose eventual breakdown accidentally split Western civilization in two. We'll discuss one of the greatest athletes who ever lived, who stood at the very top of his sport and secretly hated it, and spoke the truest sentence ever uttered about failure, and his escape is actually how this episode ends and is completely mind-blowing. We'll discuss why the best golfers on Earth have a deeply ingrained bias that costs them serious money and why even when explained to them, they cannot stop it. We'll talk about the difference between quitting and failing and the five-questioned test that tells you whether you're

quitting wisely or just fucking scared. We'll talk about why what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is true only the way a barbell makes you stronger, which is to say it doesn't. Something else does. We're going to talk about all of this and much, much more. Because in this episode, we're going to argue that every piece of advice you've ever received about failure has been aimed at at the wrong target, avoiding it, bouncing back from it, even embracing it, all of it assumes that failure is an event outside of yourself, out there in the world, but it isn't. What we're going to discover is that it is a byproduct of your own arbitrary standards and values. The truth is, you will never avoid failure. You're only going to choose how you define it. And it turns out

that there are better and worse ways to define it. And this episode is ultimately about that learning to choose. My name is Mark Manson. I'm the three-time number one New York Times best-selling author, and this is Drew Bernie, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the man who ran a premortem failure analysis on this very podcast episode and concluded that I was its top risk. And this is solved. The most comprehensive podcast in the world where every episode we aim to solve one major life problem, so you never have to deal with it again. That was a good one. That was a good one. You did not fail that. But before we jump into it, be sure to rate, review, or subscribe to the show.

It is the best thing you can do to support us. We put a lot of work into these episodes if you haven't noticed. So please show your support for the show without further ado. Our story starts in October of 2009 in San Francisco. For about 400 entrepreneurs, software engineers, and investors attend a new conference that's built around one purpose. failure. Talking about failure, embracing failure, trying to make failure a little bit more acceptable in the mainstream. The conference was called FailCon. Now, the founder of Cass Phillips, she had spent years in Silicon Valley surrounded by startups that frequently failed, yet every

conference and event that she went to, everything was about hockey stick graphs and how everybody was succeeding and how everybody was getting rich and how everybody was going to be super successful. And she just recognized that that wasn't the actual experience of most entrepreneurs. So at FailCon, everything was built around celebrating failures. At the beginning of the event, she would always ask the audience, how many people here have failed at some sort of business venture, and pretty much everybody's hand would go up. And then all of the speakers, their keynotes had to be about their failures and what they learned from their failures. And the conference was a huge hit. They did versions in like Tokyo and Dubai and London and all. And

over the place. They had sessions on all sorts of topics from really practical kind of nuts and bolts startup scaling advice to philosophical discussions of like what is suffering and what is despair. And basically, failcon kind of had a moment. You know, it got a lot of press, got a lot of attention. It was kind of a big thing in the early 2010s. But then in 2014, Phillips decided to shut it down. And the party line was that Phillips believed that she had achieved her goal, which was that she had made failure acceptable in the mainstream. But I don't really buy that and I don't think anybody else really bought that either. Personally, I think FailCon probably failed for a simple reason, which is it's actually the same reason a lot of conferences fail, which is that it was specifically

targeted towards people who don't have money. Like if you think about like a conference for people who have failing startups or have a recently failed startup, what do all those people have in common? they are probably broke or in debt. Yeah. And it's hard to build a thriving conference business on attendees that are broke or in debt. But there was actually a deeper structural problem with failcon and the philosophy behind it. And I think this is the same structural problem behind every inspirational story that we all hear about how somebody failed. You know, Michael Jordan failed so many times or Steve Jobs failed so many times.

And that is the issue of survivorship bias. So survivorship bias, it's a concept that originated with bombers in World War II. So the military, the U.S. military, noticed that all of the bombers would come back with bullet holes in the same areas of the plane. And so they did the obvious thing that you would do if you didn't think about it very much, which is they sourced more armor to reinforce the parts of the planes that had been hit with all the bullet holes. But surprisingly, this didn't prevent more bombers from being shot down. In fact, they saw no statistical increase in the amount of bombers that survived. So after a couple years of this happening, it was an analyst in the Air Force by the name of Abraham Wald that realized that people had it completely backwards.

The airplanes that were coming back with bullet holes all in the same spots, you know, around the wings and the tail fin, those were actually the places you didn't want to reinforce because those were the spots that the airplanes could survive being shot. Instead, what he pointed out is you wanted to read. reinforce all of the spots on the planes that didn't have bullet holes because the planes that got shot in those spots were the ones that didn't come back. This flaw in reasoning, this this faulty assumption that we all kind of have around this, it is something that we do all the time. Survivorship bias. It infiltrates all sorts of things, especially in our industry.

We look at a story like Steve Jobs and all the inspiration around all the times he failed or like Michael Jordan, how he got cut from his high school team. But those aren't really failure. I mean, there are literally millions of people who got cut from their high school basketball team, and none of them became Michael Jordan, right? So that is actually not something that is worth learning from. Yet it's a huge part of his story, and it's a huge part of explaining why he is who he is. You see this happen with productivity a lot in our space, right? You've got some guy who's, I don't know, he writes like five books a year and has started six companies. and I don't know, he like wakes up at five and eats an upside down waffle or something.

And so everybody goes out and starts eating upside down waffles and thinks that that's going to make them as successful as this like random dude on YouTube. And the truth is, is that the defining variables of success are often hidden from us. They're not apparent. And the things that are apparent are actually quite common. We're just not aware of the thousands of other people that share that trait, but don't share the same success. Yeah, so it's really just like a big humble brag for a lot of these people, right? They're like, they're trying to pass these things off as failure, but really it's just

part of their whole success story, which makes it still just another survivorship biased story of some kind of. But we end up kind of fetishizing those failures that are just the bullet holes in the wings on the planes that came back. Right. Right. And this is kind of where failure porn came out of. And this actually came from a guy, Jeff Lewis, who himself was a founder of this company called Founders Fund. But he wrote this post in 2014, same year that FailCon failed. He wrote this in the Washington Post, and he coined the term failure porn. And he's got this great quote in it. It says it's failure as fast fashion, peddled by wildly successful people, packaged for mass consumption that's no more reflective of real failure than commercially produced pornography is

of real sex. Very vivid, vivid example there, right? He has his own little kind of failure your porn story around this too with his his company. He was like $45,000 in credit card debt. He was going to pitch some people on his fund one day and didn't have like the 20 bucks to take a cab across town. So we had to walk on an empty stomach for 45 minutes. And it was like, he calls one of his coworkers and was like, I'm such a failure. This isn't going to work. And he got this pep talk from his coworker and everything, went and did this pitch and they got funding and then turned it around and it was a multimillion dollar company. And, you know, that's a failure porn story. That's not, he's like the real failure would have been me just giving up there.

Yeah. This is just a low point in the story. It wasn't an actual failure. Yeah. And he said the problem with this is that we trivialize failure when we do this. Real failure. This article I should go read it. It's actually full of these great little lines in it.

It says just as excessive consumption of pornography desensitizes a person to the joys of real sex, excessive consumption of failure porn desensitizes a person to the horrors of, of real failure. So again, it's these survivorship biased stories. Yeah. Take away from the actual failures, the actual harm that's actually done by real failure. Well, it's funny because just in you recounting his story, I think you described exactly what's wrong with all of these stories, which is when you said it, you said he was broken and on his last legs. And then he managed to get funding with his last pitch meeting or whatever and then went on to become.

successful. It's that went on to become successful. Yes. That's where actually all of the meat and valuable information is, but it's not nearly as exciting or interesting as the failure porn. So the failure porn is what gets shared. And it's funny too. I was thinking, like when we were prepping for this episode, I was thinking about the failcon thing. I was thinking it would probably get really old fast. If you are a struggling startup founder working 60, 70 hour weeks, barely scraping by, And year after year, you get up and you hear these like the guy who started PayPal or the guy who started, you know, whatever, get up and tell you these, all these situations that they were in at one point. At a certain point, it'd be like, okay, I get it. Like, they struggled. What did you do that worked? Right? Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a complicated message. Yeah, yeah. I don't, I don't care what didn't work. Tell me what worked. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. A quick pause will be right back after this. This episode is sponsored by 80,000 hours.

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Why do you think that is, though? Like, why do you think we romanticize? I think there's kind of a, a little bit of a self-attribution bias going on. So, like, your failures, you want to kind of externalize them, right? And you want to internalize your successes. And I think part of it is, is like, oh, no, look at me. I went through all of this. I failed all this and I still came out the other side and look how strong I am successful.

Look how goody I am. Look how, you know, I think there is kind of like a, it's a humble brag. We've talked on previous episodes. Yeah, how we, we tend to, our memories tend to package things in ways that like exalt ourselves a little bit. You don't want to attribute it to luck either from one of the luck episode. Like you're saying, oh, I got lucky in this. That doesn't feel good. When it's like, actually, yeah, a lot of other people did the exact same things as you and you came out on top.

maybe you just got lucky. Like instead you say, no, no, no, I went through, look at all the hardship I went through. Look at all this shit that I waded through. I actually went and researched how many other microprocessor companies there were at the same time as Apple. And there were like dozens,

dozens and dozens and dozens. And it was really interesting. They all failed. And they all had like similar stories and story arcs and made similar decisions. And the human mind thinks in terms of narratives. When you are constructing a narrative, you always need to have some sort of obstacle

or setback. Yeah. The three-axis story arc. Yeah. It's just the way our brains work. I think it is very natural that we look at a highly complex long-term project or path, and we just simplify it into, yeah, I was down on my luck. All these things went wrong, but I fought through it. I learned.

I survived, and now I'm successful, right? Like, that's just kind of, I think, our default narrative that we like to package around things. And also, like, narratives make things feel meaningful. Like if I was really honest about my success and like the amount of luck and circumstance that was involved in it, it would feel less meaningful to me. And I do think that we are biased towards generating something that feels very meaningful and purposeful in our lives. Yeah, there's not a lot of lesson to be taken from luck, right? No. There's something we're just lucky. So we'd rather have a narrative that's a little bit cleaner and has some sort of struggle in it that we could identify with. Are you susceptible to failure porn? Oh, man. That whole Michael Jordan story, man, especially when I as a kid, that was like, oh, yeah. You know, he's, he's just, he's got all that grit and he's, he won't give up, you know, never give up and he's just got to fight through all the failures and getting cut from the team, all of that.

Oh, dude, I bought into that big time. In the 2010s, you really did see this, too. You really did out there. It's like, no, no, no, like fail, fail fast. What was the Facebook? Move fast and break things. That whole thing. Everybody got caught up in that.

Yeah, how'd that turn out. Yeah, right? Right. It's very seductive. It's very seductive. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody, especially Americans, we love an underdog too, right?

So somebody who's down on their luck and down and out, no, they came back from it. That's a, that's a great arc. So I get asked all the time, would I change anything about subtle art? And generally, my answer is no. But it's funny, this episode, it made me kind of think back to that chapter. I'm like, ooh, yeah, I kind of, it was a little simplistic. The depth that we're going to go into in this episode is much more thorough than, what's written there. I mean, I do think the general lesson is in that you do have to make

mistake, like everybody makes mistakes, everybody fails, and that's the fuel for learning and growth. I do think that is true, but I also think that that is a bit of a simplistic way to look at it. There's a lot more going on under the hood than just simply like, oh, I tried a thing and it didn't work. What can I learn from it? Yeah. Like that's our surface level experience, but there's some deeper questions in terms of like, how are you defining success and failure? who are you choosing to be in that pursuit? Are you defining failures in ways that you are actually going to be comfortable with? Like that's actually way more interesting and that's some of the stuff that we're going to get into here. What we're calling kind of the old way of looking at

failure too though, which was more just like, oh, you're a failure. Like people, you know, people saying I'm a failure or taking it so personally or over identifying with it. Obviously that's not good. We wanted to get away from that. What we're saying is maybe we overshot a little bit too far the other way. Yeah, yeah, do we want to call this like a Hegelian synthesis, right? So aren't you, aren't you excited for the way? Do we want to call it that? Of course we do. Of course we do. This is solved. Okay. Where we over philosophize everything. So I know what a hagelian synthesis is, but why don't you go ahead and explain to everybody else what that means? George Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher, the idealist philosopher from the 19th century,

he said a lot of things. But one of the things that stuck, interestingly, he didn't actually write it, but like people later attributed it to them. So they call it a Hegelian synthesis, which is that basically thought and information progresses in like a pretty standard pattern, which is that you have a thesis of how the world works or something that's true. You have an antithesis, which is the contradiction

or an alternative hypothesis. And then what generally happens is a synthesis of those two viewpoints. It's not that one of those two things is right. It's usually some synthesis of the two points of view that wins out and becomes the next thesis and develops its own antithesis. That was like the progression of history and knowledge in his view.

The Hegelian dialectic of failure would be that the old school version of failure was that it was this horrible, shameful thing and that you should hide your failures from people and you should avoid trying anything that you're going to potentially fail. That's kind of like our default approach towards failure. The antithesis of that is that failure should be celebrated, that it should be encouraging, that we should, you know, support people and their failures, which sounds nice if you've got a startup and are trying to, like, find investors. But I don't know, like go talk to a meth head or like somebody in an abusive relationship.

That's not a message you want to be generalizing out to the broader populace. So you could say that this podcast, we are attempting a synthesis of the two views, a more holistic view of failure. and how to approach it in your own life and how to benefit from it. The important thing here, the reason why we're kind of shitting on this positive view of failure is that the data is in and it doesn't really help. We've taken the last few decades to figure that out too, right? There is this kind of weird paradox where if you go on and you talk to people,

they'll tell you, just like in the business world, let's say, it's easier than ever to start a business. Right. And yet people are more afraid to start a business than ever. This is right after all of these, this 20 years of failure worship has come out of the culture, right? And yet people are still more risk averse than ever. Still more risk averse than ever. Like just some stats like basically one and two Americans say they would fear starting a business because of the fear of failure, because it might fail.

Half of all people. Around the world, too, they've done these surveys every year. and the share of people agreeing that starting a business is easy, that climbed to almost 60%. And yet, again, almost one and two people all around the world say they're afraid of failing in one of these ventures, even though it's easier than ever. So the message didn't stick, basically, right? You could actually argue that things got even worse. We didn't get more comfortable with failure, right? We probably got less than what actually happened here, right?

What was actually going on? One of the big things that I found anyway through all this is that perfectionism actually seems to be becoming more and more of a problem. If people were actually taking this to heart, if they were taking this advice, this failure worship to heart, what you would probably see is actually less perfectionism out there. We see the exact opposite of that in all these different studies. Now, before I jump into that though, real quick, there's two different kinds of perfectionism that researchers kind of two broad buckets that they can sort it into, right? One is what they call perfectionistic strivings. Okay. This is when you hold high standards and you are aiming for success.

This is basically fine. As long as you don't like take it too far, you're really just like, I have high standards and I want to, I want to hit those, but you don't take it too personally when you don't hit them. Okay. Contrast that with perfectionistic concerns, which is the more kind of toxic form of perfectionism that people can have, which is basically you're holding yourself to a very high standard. And if you don't hit that, there's something very wrong. with you or the world or whatever, right? That is actually associated with more like mental health

problems even to depression, anxiety, less well-being that you have with that, okay? What they've found is if you kind of control for those concerns, if you, if you can parse all of that out, if you just have this like striving perfectionism where you're like, I want things to be better and I'm going to aim for them and it's okay if I don't hit them, but I'm going to continue to aim for them and strive for them. That seems to be okay. That seems to be fine. It's when we get into that more toxic of perfectionism that the wheels start to fall off a little bit. Okay? When we actually look at the numbers, too, over the last 20 to 30 years, across all the

countries that celebrate failure the most, mostly the Anglosphere, right? United States, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, those places. We all celebrate failure a whole bunch. Perfectionism has actually risen, and the toxic kinds of perfectionism have risen the most, even, too. They've done some studies from the late 2010s up to today, and they see this trend is just accelerating. It's not getting any better. They basically concluded that, and this is a quote, young people perceive that others are more demanding of them. They are more demanding of others and

more demanding of themselves. Like people are holding us to higher standards. We're holding ourselves to higher standards and we're holding other people to higher standards all at the same time. Like all of that is going up when really probably none of that is actually true. Okay. And yet that's against the backdrop of, hey, it's okay to fail. Go out there and fail. Nobody cares. Give it your best shot. Give it your best shot and it's going to be okay. And yet we have this right. imperfectionism and rise of these ungodly standards that we put on ourselves during that. So what's going on here? I hate to be that guy.

Yeah. But I think it's the phones. I think it's the phones? I think it's the phones. You think it's the phones? The trend started before the phones. I think it accelerated with the phones. It could be the internet.

I mean, the difference between, say, our adolescents in kids today, you know, when we were growing up, if you asked a girl out and she shot you down, nobody remembered, nobody saw it. I remember. I remember. Nobody else remembered. Nobody else saw it. You know, if you made a huge mistake in front of the class or you did something really embarrassing or you got kicked out of school or whatever, now everything is documented. There are consequences to every failure that exists today in a way that didn't exist before. And I actually think that there's some usefulness of forgetting. I was reading about Walt Disney recently. And it was super fascinating. and that he came from a family of failed entrepreneurs. And he himself was a failed entrepreneur. Like what today we know is Disney was like his, I think his third or fourth business that he started. And his father started a bunch of businesses that failed.

And his uncle started a bunch of businesses that failed. And it was funny because what happened back in those days is you would start a business, it would fail, you'd go into a bunch of debt, and you just pack your shit up and go to the next town because nobody in the next town knew that you failed. Right? And so you could start over,

you could get new investments or get a new loan and start a new business. And so the Disney's would kind of like bounce from town to town around the Midwest, trying all these different ventures, watching them fail spectacularly. And then like just kind of moving on and not having it track with them. Whereas today, if something like calamitous happens at one of your jobs, it's going to be online forever, right? There's going to be a record of it, potentially forever. People are always going to have access either.

to your old workplace or your old boss or your old LinkedIn profile or something you wrote like 14 years ago. It's like comedians getting canceled for tweets that they wrote in 2008. You know, like there's just, there's a record today that follows you that didn't exist in previous generations. Even if people are more accepting a failure in the moment, which I agree with you, I don't think they are these days. Even if they were, the fact that that moment is now going to follow you for decades across your life means that you have to wait it so much higher than you would have otherwise. Yeah, I mean, I guess I do remember, you know, when social media started to be a thing and

we had to be warned like, hey, watch what you put online. Now think of that. I mean, that's the, now you just don't even do it because you can't even help if it gets online or not. Yeah. I mean, I remember. So to your point about it being maybe before the phones, I remember when I was single in my 20s and it started to become a thing about like Googling the people.

you were going on dates with because you would sometimes you would find like some pretty crazy shit. I just imagine that that's like 10 X. These two researchers, Kieran and Hill, they give some other reasons as well. Well, like one of them being just kind of the structural competition, especially like in capitalist societies, like competition in the markets got so crazy. And that just kind of bled into all the other areas of life. Getting into a good university or something like that, that all of a sudden became super, super important and like doing your your application by committee, you know, and having your whole family

or getting tutors or that really took off in the last, you know, 20 or 30 years as well. Like the competition, intense competition around those sorts of things happened. At the same time, too, they're talking about the collectivist institutions that we used to have where some of that would get diffused. Right. Some of that kind of tension of your failures or whatever and your church or your whatever communities you were in, church, temples, whatever you were going to, those are not. You know, it's much more individualistic, like hyper individualism has contributed to a very competitive life, not just marketplace, but life.

And people are by and large, lonelier, so they have less of a support system, right? So they have fewer friends or family members close to them that they can rely upon if they do screw up or if something does go wrong. It's interesting because what we're talking about, it is not about people's philosophical acceptance of failure. It is more about the stakes they're involved, right? Like when you remove social and emotional safety nets, when you make everything more competitive, and when you add a historical record that follows you for pretty much your entire life and you can't get rid of it, what that does is it just puts so much more importance on each action and behavior that in a way that did not exist, certainly 30 years ago, but definitely not like 100 years ago. One other thing they bring up to is like anxious and controlling parenting. There's some debate around this. Their studies have been questioned a little bit.

But you do see it on at least an individual level. Like kids who do come from households where the parents are very controlling and, you know, expect a lot. They have very high rates of this toxic perfectionism as well. Whether that's pervasive across the culture or not, I'm not sure. But that can definitely, if you're one of those people, that can definitely have a big impact as well. Shout out to all of our Asian listeners right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So perfectionism is rising. We see that. It is really worse amongst young people, too. This is where we have the most data, too. We don't have as much data for older people. But it is worse amongst young people. Half of all teenagers all around the world, they fear judgment for failing in some way. They report that they say when they're failing. They worry about what others might think of them, which, you know, okay, that's teenagers. I get that. But the stats of risk aversion are so high right now. They're so high. They're accelerating, like I was saying, right? are not asking each other out. They're not taking risks. They're not going out. They're not having sex. They're not even learning the drive at the same rates that they used to.

So it's, yeah, there's a lot of risk aversion going on. One really interesting thing we found that too. And a lot of people think that, well, I'm just not as good as these people. And so, of course, I'm afraid of failure or whatever. An interesting thing we found was actually that the fear of failure is oftentimes the worst amongst the highest achievers. So people out there who are actually already doing the straight A students, you know, the ones that are doing all the clubs.

the ones that are out there achieving, looking like they're, you know, having a great time. They're actually the ones who are the most afraid of failure, which is fascinating. I feel like so many people

use fear or failure as an excuse for not doing the thing, whereas it's like, okay, the people who are actually out there doing the thing and they're doing it well are more afraid than you are.

Right. And we're going to find out why that is here in a little bit, too. What would you say is your relationship with failure? Because I know you've struggled with perfectionism quite a bit throughout your life.

Yeah. I wanted to come in here and say, well, you know, like, I don't, the failures I do have, I don't see them as failures. But then I think about the perfection. I have some talks of perfectionism. What it ends up doing is it makes you not take a lot of the risks that that you would want to take or just like, I don't know, go and find it out. Like, I look at some of this stuff you do and you're just like, we're going to try this. And it doesn't work. Let's just keep moving. You know, I don't think you're anyone to dwell on that. And I dwell on something. stuff, man. I dwell on stuff for sure. It does cost me a lot in terms of, yeah, in terms of the outcomes that I've seen. I just haven't taken some of the bigger swings that I probably would have because of that. Do you think some of that is that you grew up with higher stakes? Because, like, I know, like, my wife grew up pretty poor and, like, the margin for error when she was young was just very slim. So she's developed, I think she has kind of evolved into a person that is just very wary of of risking failure. Yeah. And I think if you do come from that kind of background and

the way you got out of it was by through performance, that puts a lot of weight on performance then, right? Like I got out of that through school and, you know, the activities that I was involved in that were that contributed to my education and all of that. And so you learned that, oh, in order to not have to go back into that world or not be in a more precarious state, you have to perform. You have, there's something you have to do or be or whatever it is. And that, yeah, I bet a lot of people can identify with that. I'm a weirdo. I'm definitely, I think I'm somebody that are in a lot of ways, Mark.

You really are. I think this is one area where I'm not relatable. I think I'm really good with this just because, I mean, I'm not, I don't give a fuck, right? Like, I just, I genuinely don't. Like it really, I mean, you've seen this for years. It really doesn't bother me. Like launching something that, fails or putting something out there that bombs or, you know, saying something that gets me

a thousand angry email. Like, I'm just kind of water off my back, you know. And it's interesting because when I was younger, I spent a lot of time kind of thinking about where that comes from. And I've got all sorts of narratives and explanations, you know, growing up in kind of a weird environment that I always felt like a black sheep where I grew up. My dad's a lot more kind of rigid and perfectionist than I am. But my grandfather, I mean, you talk about not giving a fuck. Like, he started seven companies. He became a millionaire three times, went bankrupt three times.

And according to my dad, he said, if you saw him, you would never know which end of the pendulum he was on. Like, you could never tell it didn't bother him. He didn't care. And I've felt that way, too. Like, I've lost a lot of money on some stupid decisions. And it actually freaked me out how much. it didn't bother me. Is there any area of your life where you identify failure that either you did

or didn't learn from or like is there any particular area? I've thought about this in terms of regrets. So like I generally don't regret many things. And what I, the thing I would point to, the things that like I do feel, say, dwell on or I feel like some degree of shame or guilt, it's when I've, I feel like I've failed people. Yeah. Yeah. So. So if it's just me and if it's like just my money or my stuff, I really don't seem to care. Like I'm good. You know, I could sleep on this concrete floor tomorrow. Like it's fine.

If I feel like I failed somebody I really care about, like that eats at me for a long time. Yeah. We're going to get into some of that then. Oh, oh. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, am I getting on the sofa this episode? No, no, no, no, no, no.

Oh. I mean, yes, but we'll get into why that might. be, I think. Yeah, this hints at where we're going with this episode and that I don't actually see most of my failures as failures. The crux of what we're going to get into is that failure is actually more of a definitional problem than it is an actual problem. Like, the fact that you are failing at things in your life is not really the problem. The real problem, if there is one, is how you've chosen to define failure for yourself and how you've chosen to measure yourself.

And that's actually where we're going to end up going with this, starting with the next chapter. But to understand that and really have an appreciation for it, we do need to get into some of the evolutionary mechanisms behind our sense of failure, the feelings and emotions that come along with it, the social repercussions that are associated with it. And why something like an embarrassing email

or getting shot down by somebody you have a crush on, feels like fucking death in the moment, like just makes you want to crawl in a hole and never come out again. Like, why does that happen? Why does it hurt so much? Why does failure hurt so bad? Why is it so hard sometimes? And the important thing is that the answer,

it's not just your childhood. It's not a mindset. It's not about learning, you know, finding the silver. lining and things. Like, sure, all of those things matter at the margins, but really we're going to go way back and we're going to go back two million years and look at some of the biological machinery that's going on behind the scenes and try to get a deeper understanding of why all these things happen. So stick around. But first, we're going to take a quick break, so don't go anywhere.

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And get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3K2 with your first subscription of AG1, NextGen, or AG1 Pro. That's solved. dot deals slash AG1. So the modern research on why failure and loss hurts so much begins in 1969 in Israel. It's Hebrew University.

Daniel Kahneman is a new professor and he invites Amos Tversky to give a guest lecture to his psychology students. And at the time, Tversky is a bit of a celebrity academic in Israel. He's considered a genius. He was a very famous paratrooper and one of the recent wars. He's generally beloved by everybody. And he gets up in front of Connman's class and he starts lecturing about how people's guesses are actually often statistically accurate.

That if you ask somebody to estimate like a large number across a population, that people's intuitions are surprisingly good at this. Now, Conneman is watching him lecture about this and he is thinking to himself, this is total bullshit. because Conaman was also a veteran, but he had worked in the psychological unit. So he had watched as IDF analysts had made confident predictions, created statistical models, come up with all sorts of plans, and been horribly wrong about every single one of them. He had actually seen the opposite, that people's intuitions were absolutely terrible at predicting the future. So he politely lets Tversky finish his lecture and all the students leave and he walks up to him afterwards. in some classic Israeli fashion, he's like, I think you're wrong.

This is a bunch of bullshit. And the two begin arguing about it. And as they're arguing, finally, they just kind of look at each other and agree, they're like, well, then let's study it and figure this out. So they plan to do some experiments together and thus began probably the most fruitful research partnership in the history of the psychological field. They would go on to publish dozens and dozens of studies. They would revolutionize not just the field of psychology, but also behavioral economics. They would win a Nobel Prize.

Their influence in how we understand human thinking and human decision making really can't be overstated. Now, their method was really interesting, which is that they would kind of just sit around together and they would spitball hypothetical situations to each other, like little thought experiments. And the reason they did this was to test each other's intuition. So they would ask each other things like, let's say 600 people have a terminal illness. And you have enough money to finance one of two medical programs. The first medical program is guaranteed to save 200 of the 600 people, but you're going to lose 400 of them. But the second medical program, you have a one-third chance of saving all 600, but a two-thirds chance of all 600 dying.

Which one would you choose? I would probably go with the guaranteed 200. Yeah. I probably would too. It just instinctively feels better for some reason. Right. And they notice this pretty much universally. Like almost everybody picks the first medical program,

even though mathematically they have the exact same risk profile. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's funny little things like this, right? Like where it's like statistically both options are the same, but we all intuitively or feel pretty strongly about the first purpose. program. So they had another little fun thought experiment where they would present students with the situation where you could flip a coin and if it came up heads, you would make $1,000, but if it came up tails, you would lose $1,000. Sure enough, pretty much all the students turn this down.

But what was really interesting is they changed the offer. So you flip a coin, if it lands heads, you get $1,050. If it's tails, you only lose $1,000. Right? So the expected value is actually positive. Okay. If you had infinite money, you should flip that coin as many times as you possibly can. Interestingly, pretty much all the students still turned down the opportunity to flip the coin. So time after time, after time, they started to notice a pattern, which was that people tend to weigh losing something more than they value gaining something. They even did another little thought experiment with this is that they took one group of people and they put a coffee mug in front of them. They said, how much would you pay for this coffee mug on average?

And let's say that people said, five bucks. Then they would take another group of people and they would give them the coffee mug and say, how much would you sell this for? And people wanted to sell it for more than they were willing to buy it for, right? They valued losing the thing more than they valued gaining it in the first place. And this was really driven home for them because in 1973, Israel was invaded by all of its Arab neighbors. And they were called into active duty in one.

what today is known as the Yom Kippur War. And what was interesting is that both of them, as they were riding off to the front, when they started looking at all of the intelligence failures and the military failures that happened leading up to that war, they kept seeing the same pattern. Intelligence agencies that didn't want to risk losing too much, so they papered over evidence of an impending invasion with different narratives or different stories. People who looked away from potential catastrophe because the loss of being wrong about it would have been so catastrophic for their career or, you know, for whatever, their platoon or their agency or whatever. Now, this phenomenon eventually would become known as loss aversion.

And Connomen and Tversky's big contribution was that they found pretty consistently that the ratio of how people weighted loss versus gain of the same thing was roughly two to one. that people generally experience the loss of something as twice as bad as the benefit of gaining the same thing. And if anybody who's been competitive in sports or tried to win at anything, like everybody knows that the pain of losing is significantly more severe than the joy of winning, and it lasts much longer. Now, they eventually kind of bundled up a lot of their experiments, and they broadly called it prospect theory, and they would go on to win a Nobel Prize for it,

2002. Unfortunately, Tversky did not survive that long, but Kahneman has always insisted that the work was theirs together and has always given him credit for all of the work that they've done together. But it raises a really interesting question, which is that if loss ofversion is very much just baked into our psychology, it seems to be hardwired in all of us, why is it there? What are the circumstances in which we evolved that loss aversion would make sense in nature. It's kind of cruel, right? Right. And as we're going to find out, you can't train yourself out of it. You can't convince yourself. Like, being aware of this does not change the fact that it, that it exists inside of your brain. It's pretty much a fundamental aspect of how we perceive

risk and loss in our lives. So then the question is why? Why, Drew Burdney? Tell me why. It's very cruel. Like I said, right? It seems like a very cruel thing of the universe, I guess, to deliver us this, like, pain hurts so much more than, uh, gaining something, you know, something good is not as equal as something that is equally bad. Like, we're just, we experience pain so much more vividly and acutely than we do of gaining something, right? And why is that? If we look at, if we kind of step back a little bit, there's this really interesting study done on capuchin monkeys, okay? You know, those capuchins are like the little, you think of the like little grinder, you know, like those little monkeys. You with the little

symbols? Yeah, with little symbols. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like this. Right. Yeah, they're cute little monkeys. But they're smart too. But we diverged from them about like 40 million years ago. Like a common ancestor, we haven't had one of those for a very, very long time. But you can train them to operate and somewhat of an economy, right? This one researcher Keith Channey's from Yale back in the 2000s, he trained these Capuchins to basically trade aluminum coins that he made for apples and fruits like that, right? Yeah. And they figured it out pretty quick. They showed them that They could, there was market fluctuations. Like some, some days apples would cost this much or this much.

And the capuchins would participate in this economy. Okay. So they were smart enough to even do that. What they found out, too, is they kind of set up this experiment where you could test loss aversion. So they had one of the experimenters go and they would offer them one apple. Every now and then they would give them two apples for the same coin, for the same aluminum coin. And monkeys figured this out. Okay, fine.

So you got another researcher that would come in and would show them present them two apples, but would sometimes take one apple away. But on average, they were always getting the same number, like 1.4 apples or something like that on average, right, for every time that they would give them one of these coins. Even those monkeys, though, at that point, they preferred the first person who would guarantee them one and sometimes give them an extra one. They didn't like the one who would give them two and then sometimes take one away. Right. So even in that context, like these this this this uh monkey that we haven't shared an ancestor with for 40 million years has loss aversion they would rather take that that sure gain rather than have something that

would be taken away from them okay it is about 71% of the trades about 70% of the trades shook out like that and they've actually shown this in other uh primate species too one's even closer to this too so chimpanzees gorillas orangutans they all show this what they call endowment effect, which is basically what you're talking about it is when you have something, you would prefer to hang on to it rather than trade it for something else. Even if that other thing might be a little bit more valuable, you're going to take the sure bet more likely because you don't want to experience that loss. Yeah. Okay. So it seems to be very, very ancient hardware that we have, like in the mammalian brain. And in fact, it is what the neuroscientific studies that they've done

on this have found very ancient parts of our brain that are involved with this. very deep mammalian structures, it kind of splits into these like two systems. You have a system that evaluates subjective value of whatever it is in the environment that you're hanging on to. And then the systems associated with like negative emotions. And both of these fire up whenever we're experiencing a loss like this. And so it's, and then it's very ancient, these very ancient brain systems that are in like all mammals.

So it seems to be very, very hardwired into us. Now, the question you asked was, why? Yeah. Like, why would it be that way? And if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, right? Most of our history as a species has kind of, we've been living on the edge of survival, right? We're on the margin of survival. On that margin, if you get a windfall of some resource, food or whatever it is, that's kind of nice.

It's going to get you through another month or two, maybe, at the most. If you lose something in that same environment, though, you could be dead next week. There's an asymmetry going on there. You lose something, you're dead. If you gain something, you live a little longer. You live a little bit longer. Yeah. So there's an asymmetry there where the loss is much more significant in terms of your survival than a gain would be in that.

Kahneman and Tversky figured out is that that's about a two to one ratio. Yeah. And so that's why you would have this bias towards wanting to hang on to things and not lose them, right? The problem comes in is that we're using this ancient evolutionary hardware on modern problems that don't have those same types of consequences, right? Right. So, like, if you're going to lose 50 bucks or something like that, that's going to be the, like, emotionally the same as gaining $100. The valence there is completely skewed, when that doesn't really have a whole lot of bearing on your life now. Or like, you're looking at your quarterly reports at your job or something like that.

And if you see the loss on there, you're registering a loss in your brain using that ancient hardware and that ancient software going on. And it's registering as, oh, this is a threat to my survival when it's really not. So that's the theory, the evolutionary mismatch theory anyway, is that we're applying these in all these wrong ways. I think it's exacerbated by the fact that you could probably answer to that in modern life, the gain of something is worth more than the loss of the thing, right? Like if you just think about money, right? Like the more money you make, the easier it is to make more. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty well established.

Like financial wealth compounds in all sorts of different ways. Whereas like losing money, I mean, sure, you can go broke, but like you can't really, I mean, you can go into debt. You can declare bankruptcy and kind of start over. I would argue that the asymmetry today is actually the other way. I feel like probably people who are very. intelligent risk takers, financial risk takers, whether it's traders, finance people, entrepreneurs, even executives at large corporations. Like they probably have gotten good at fighting against their loss aversion, like leaning

against it, not listening to it. Yeah, it's easy to like do this in terms like business and stuff like that. We also do it in a lot of other areas of our life, though, too, right? Like a breakup hurts a lot more than like getting into a new relationship feels good, right? I think that's a big one. I think there's a lot of people who was like, oh, I took this for granted and then I lost it. And then all of a sudden you feel all this weight coming down on it. That's loss aversion.

Yeah. You know, like you took the relationship for granted or something like that. And then once it's gone, then it hurts so much. That's loss aversion. Yeah. That also is loss aversion. Or losing a job, too, just like you're saying, there's like, oh, that's probably a good thing in this. And these days you go find a better job or there's more jobs out there, right?

Yeah. But it still feels worse. It stings more than it is any gain. And anybody will tell you this. Anybody who acquired any sort of success will tell you this, that the losses hurt more than the gains. The gains are never as good as you think they're going to be. That's baked in. That's hardwired in.

And we can't get around it. I think probably the most interesting example of loss aversion that I found was there was a really interesting study done in 2011 on golfers. Great title of a paper. It's called Is Tiger Woods Lawsivers? And basically is these two guys, Pope and Schweitzer. they analyze two and a half million putts on the PGA tour, over 400 different pros, 239 tournaments. It's actually a really interesting way that they set up the study.

So for people who don't play a lot of golf, there are things called birdies, which is kind of the equivalent of like gaining a point, and then there are things called par, which is not losing a point. You stay at the same number. So you can view putting for a birdie as putting to gain a point,

and you could view putting for par as putting to not lose a point. Not lose. Okay, all right. So what these researchers did is that they took the exact same golf courses, they took putts of the exact same distance, same exact location, but different players in different circumstances,

either birdie putts or par putts. And they analyzed all millions and millions of putts. They analyzed the distance, location, direction, everything, apples to apples. And they found a significant difference in terms of the accuracy of birdie putts versus par putts. So birdie putts, they go in 83 and a half percent of the time. Par putts go in 88% of the time, which is crazy.

Yeah. Like, there shouldn't be any difference. Right. Right. So you're saying, hold on. So you're saying, like, let's say it's a birdie putt at 10 feet. Yes. And it's a par putt at 10 feet.

From in the same direction. Same direction, same spot, same everything. Yes. They're more likely to make the par putt than the birdie putt. Correct. Okay. Okay. And the argument, the conclusion is that players,

are paying a lot more attention. They're much more focused. They take more time. They're much more diligent. They're much more careful with their swing. They're afraid to lose. They're afraid to lose. Okay.

So they put more effort into the par putts than they do the birdie putts. Interesting. And then that shows up in the result. Okay. So they're loss averse in that situation. Okay. So what's interesting is that the loss ofversion, it mellowed as the tournament went on. So like golf tournaments, they go on for four days.

And the further you get into the tournament, you're no longer really playing against the course, which is what you do on day one. You're playing against the other golfers. By day four, you know how many strokes behind you are the person in front of you, how many strokes ahead you are of the person behind you. And so what you see is the loss of version stop showing up with Bertie and Parputs, and it starts showing up with their placement on the scoreboard. Interesting. So the standard changes, the relevant metric changes. And their behavior changes because of that. Yes.

And this is a nice little metaphor of how we're going to approach failure throughout this episode. Loss aversion never changes. What you are loss averse to changes based on your definition of failure. So when the definition of failure is bogeying on a hole of golf, you experience loss aversion there. But when that definition of loss changes to falling behind the guy ranked behind you, then that becomes what you become loss ofverse to. Interesting. Okay. That's fascinating. Okay. Okay. So that's all well and good. We don't want to fall behind the leader bors in golf. Yeah. We want the best treats that we can trade for, all of that. Like, why does it hurt so bad when there really isn't anything being lost? Being lost? Right. Or like there's no physical damage. Like physical pain makes sense, right? Yeah. And like a golf game, right? Like you lose a golf game. Nobody died. Right. Nobody's going to die. But like people get really upset. Why?

Yeah. Why do they do that, right? There's something inside of you that is treating that as some kind of injury of some sort, obviously. But what is that? Like, what is being injured throughout all of this, right? What turns out there was this, this researcher in the 90s, Mark Leary, he came up with this idea of what he calls the sociometer, right?

And it's really what it is, is tracking your status within a social group. So, you know, in our evolutionary past, we grew up in these small groups, and letting someone down, failing something, that actually that had real stakes to it right and so you would lose status in that situation if you were to fail and fail other people especially in that situation and losing status meant you could be left alone which meant you could die right there was like real stakes involved with this so it's not this like cold calculation that we're doing either it's got to hurt yeah it has to hurt for you to be motivated to not want to fail and not want to let other people

down like this yeah this again this is what he called the sociopiomical It comes back to the fact that like pain at the end of the day is an evolutionary tool. It's a nudge towards behavior that's going to help you survive and replicate, or at least helped us survive and replicate for hundreds of thousands of years. And so in this case, it's like, okay, even if it is an arbitrary game, even if it is just something as simple as like who can carry the biggest rock or whatever, in our caveman days, stuff like that mattered because it indicated who was the most reliable, who was going to help the tribe the most, who could save your life when you needed it, who could hunt the biggest game

when it came down to it, and then status began to become attached to that. And so we have this like internal measurement gage inside of our head at all time trying to gauge how much status do we have with the group around us. Yeah. And it happens like almost automatically too. Even if you don't know the people around you, if there's any sense of there's a status thing going on, you latch on to that and you try to figure out exactly where you're sitting within that. Which is really interesting. set of studies that was done by Leary and others, too, that was, they brought people into the lab, and they had, strangers were assigned just these meaningless groups. There wasn't really any meeting to them, but they were told that they would either be included or excluded by the group.

Okay, just people would be like, people are either going to accept you or deny you based on just some arbitrary criteria, whatever it was. Even that, the people who you never met, Okay, these were strangers people had never met before. You'd never meet again. Tasks that you were doing within this group that didn't matter. If you were excluded or included, like had an effect on how you felt about yourself in that situation. Yeah. Like, that's how ingrained it is.

And you could tell your status from that. If you told them, if you told the people that this was just random, like your status has just decided randomly, it didn't matter. But if you said there's other people judging you based on this, people you didn't know, again, would never interact with again. doing tasks you never that don't mean anything it's how innate it is it's so funny so have you ever have you ever like volunteered for a psych study yeah yeah yeah so i used to do it in college a lot yeah and uh i would do anything for 10 bucks back then you'd say exactly exactly and i remember i used to go in and and it was it was always really funny because yeah they they just put you in a room of strangers

you've no idea what you're there for you have no idea what you're going to do like they they come in and they ask you to do like some very random thing and i'm just i'm just thinking back and and imagining, like, walking into that room with, like, five or ten other people, and then having the researcher just look at me and be like, who here wants Mark to stay? And, like, nobody raises their hand. Yeah. I would be so fucking pissed. I would be like, fuck all you people. Fuck you. Who do you think you are? Right. And it could be, who cares what the reason is for, right? Like, it's just imagining that happening. Yeah. Is enough to like, yeah, I can like imagine the emotion that would come up. Importantly, in these studies, too, what they found is that it's really the exclusion.

It's this loss aversion going on again, okay? Because when the same was true and you were like included in the group, like they found the people who, yeah, oh yeah, you were accepted into the group and you're good. They felt fine. They're like, okay, fine, whatever. It's when you're excluded that the pain really came in, that that was measurable and they got a measurable response from that, that people who just felt worse about themselves. That sociometer really took a hit. Only during the exclusions. It's a threat detection system. It's not a bonus reward system or anything like that. You don't get to feel good because you get included.

You only feel bad because you're excluded. It's loss aversion is what it is. But it's at the social level. Losing social status is really the measure that hurts the most. You know what this reminds me of? You didn't go out to many nightclubs, did you? I was not a clubber. Good, good for you.

Yeah. Good for you. Biggest waste of fucking time and money ever. I went to way too many clubs. And a lot of nightclubs, especially. in like big cities like New York and London. Yeah. They have a setup where it's like you have the VIP section, right? Where you have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to basically sit at a table behind a velvet

rope where it's just as loud and shitty as the people on the other side. It's completely arbitrary. And it was funny because I remember when I was young and broke and I used to go out to clubs all the time. You know, I would sit there. I'd be like one of the cattle herd like crammed into the middle of the bar waiting 20. minutes to get a drink. And I would look over at the VIP area, you know, they all have their own waitresses and the waitresses are super hot. And there's like champagne bottles and sparklers and everything. I'd be like, man, it must be so cool to be in there. Like it'd be so much nicer, so much easier.

You could like talk to people. You can meet a bunch of girls. And I used to think that for years in my early 20s. And then I remember once I got a little bit older and I got some money, I went out to a couple clubs and I bought VIP tables for me and my friends. I just remember sitting there and being like, this is it? It's so dumb. This is so fucking stupid. I just, I just wasted it so much money for nothing.

Exactly. Yeah. So getting included had almost zero benefit. Zero benefit. Yeah. Zero benefit. Being excluded hurt like hell. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. That's exactly the sociometer's mechanism there. Yeah. And again, it just comes back to that whole loss of version thing, like losing status with our evolutionarily ancient brains that we have, that signal literal death at one point in our evolutionary past, right? Yeah. It's just being kind of hijacked now in a lot of these situations. That's a perfect example of when it's being hijacked in a way that's screwing you over, basically. And there's a lot of places that will mess with you, you know, different status games

and, you know, airlines do this, right, with their statuses and points and, you know, do you get the premium economy seat or did you get a free upgrade to like the, you know, special extra legroom seat, you know? And it's, and people, love it. It really taps into something extremely primal in us. Yeah. Yeah, it does, even if it's super arbitrary, like you're saying. Yeah. So yeah, there's another thing to, like you've kind of been hinting at, you can't really talk yourself out of this. Yeah. You can't reason your way out. You can't, even if you know about it, it really doesn't change a whole lot. One of these studies that they did as well was they had participants. They would speak into a microphone,

and just talk about themselves. And then they received feedback from a quote-unquote stranger. It was just the researchers, basically. that either accepted or rejected their stories. Like, this was a good story, this wasn't a bad story that you just told about yourself, right? The rejected participants, they would dismiss these impressions. They were, whatever. These people, I don't care about these people.

It doesn't matter. Somebody I don't know. But when they measure their sociometer status kind of thing, how they felt about themselves later, it actually still went down no matter what. Wow. Even if you had that self-talk, like we always say, oh, just screw them.

They don't know what they're talking about. It's like the comment section. Yeah, the comment section. Dude, it digs out you, doesn't it? I mean, it's what... It's so funny because it's like, I know it doesn't matter, but it's like, it's still, it just sucks. Yeah, yeah. And, like, good feedback, you're like, oh, that's, that was nice.

Yeah, exactly. Like, there'll be hundreds and hundreds of comments. But you'll hang on to that one. Right. And then one person, like, makes fun of my hair or my shoes or something. And I'm like, oh, fuck you. Joey Bologna, 648. Right.

What do you know? Yeah. People that you don't know will never interact with again. Yeah. And arbitrary standards. Yeah. Yep. Fucking mammalian brain.

Can't get away from it. Yeah. No, well, exactly. You know, when somebody rejects us for something completely arbitrary, right? Like, and we're not actually losing it. You know, it's like we lose a golf game or we lose, you know, Joe Blow next to us that can carry a bigger rock or, you know, run faster than us. Like, why do we feel so bad? Like, what is actually being harmed?

It was funny because when you said that the first thing that came to my mind was the ego. And it's interesting because if you. actually go back to Freud's theory. You know, we've done a whole episode on the ego unsolved. People can go back and listen to it. The TLDR is that Freud's original theory about the ego has just been completely butchered over the years and people have a very, almost like a cartoonish understanding of what the ego is and the purpose it serves us psychologically.

The real understanding of the ego, Freud's like actual explanation of what the ego is, ties in perfectly with the sociometer theory, right? Like Freud's argument is that we have two primary incentives in our lives. One is our instinctual urges and just base drives. And then one is the culture and social influence around us, right? We want to satisfy our urges and needs, but we also want people to approve of us, people to like us, to have social status, to fit in the cultural norms, social norms to be seen, you know, to be respected and admired and all those things. And the ego is the self-definition

that balances those two things. The ego is, it is the, the bundle of narratives we tell about ourselves that exist to help us both get our fundamental needs met and satisfy our urges, but also do it in a way that doesn't make everybody hate us, doesn't get us kicked, out of the tribe. Yeah, I had a psychology professor explained it really well one time, I think. So you have your urges and your base desires and everything like that and you have society's expectations on top of you. And then the ego comes in and says, wait, I have a plan. Like, I thought that was a really good way to say what the ego is. I got it, guys. I got this. Yeah. Yeah. But what's interesting about the ego is that it is we protect it as if it's part of ourselves, right? Like,

And when the ego is threatened or attacked, we feel the same physiological response that we do if our body is threatened or attacked. And so when we talk about failure, failure of social status, failure of losing the respect and admiration of others, it very much is a threat to the ego, right? Because it is a threat to our self-understanding of how we feel about ourselves and how we see ourselves. And sure enough, you see this in the research as well. Like, people will experience the pain of failure, even when they're alone by themselves. Even when nobody's around and nobody can see what happened or what they're doing, right? Like, we still, even if you're alone in your room trying to do a thing that you think is important, when you fail at it, you're going to feel like a loser.

And the reason is is because that sociometer, it doesn't turn off when you're by yourself. It still exists within you. And you are always using it to gauge what your relative social status is to other people. And even when you were doing things by yourself, you are still measuring your ability to do those things against that sociometer of like the standard that you have set for yourself based on the people around you, based on society at large, based on whatever culture you exist within. Now there's a word here that we've been dancing around and I've intentionally wanted to dance around it. And that is self-esteem. Like another way to think about what this internal sociometer is is self-esteem. I mean, one day we'll do an episode on self-esteem.

We definitely should. And we will talk about all of the ways that it got butchered and mangled over the decades. But it is, I think most people conceptualize self-esteem as something that exists independently and internally on your route, right? Like when people say, oh, you just need to have better self-esteem or like, oh, we just need to improve her self-esteem, it is often said in a way that if you just felt good by yourself on your own, then everything would be fine. But the truth is, is that self-esteem is intimately connected to how you're seen by others, right?

Because ultimately, the way you feel about yourself is a response to how you predict other people are going to feel about you based on what you can do. So we're tying together a whole bundle of psychological concepts here. But the point is, is that failure hurts, regardless of whether you actually lost. something or not, whether it's a tangible thing you lost or just some abstract arbitrary measurement that you failed to live up to, it hurts whether you agree with the people judging you or not. It hurts whether you're even with other people or not. And it hurts whether it even makes sense or not. And like you said, the reason it hurts in all these circumstances is because it identified as a threat prevention system, as a way.

way to protect yourself and to keep you in good graces with the people around you and to keep you competent and living up to expectations that other people set for you and that you set for yourself. We still haven't defined failure yet. And a lot of that is because it doesn't really matter what the definition of failure is. If you lost something, either tangible or abstract, it's going to feel bad. No matter what, you could be fucking Steve Jobs and you wake up, it's going to feel shitty. Right? Warren Buffett, wakes up. up, Zizi lost a bunch of money, it's going to feel really shitty and it's going to feel worse than making that same amount of money. It doesn't matter who you are, what situation

you're in, how smart you are, how many ways you rationalize the importance of the failure, how many lessons you gain from the failure, it is going to suck always, all the time. It's just fascinating. I don't know. It's kind of sick. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it is. It's really cool. Like our minds are just set up to be kind of of cruel to ourselves. And we create these egos. And these egos are what is reflecting back on us that we that hurts us too. Like it's the target of our pain, but it's also our own creation. And it is the whole purpose of the ego is to be hurt. Right. Right. Because by being hurt, the ego is signaling to us that our livelihood is under threat. Right. So we construct our egos.

We create all these narratives about who we are and what we can do and who's going to like us and who's not going to like us, so that all those narratives can fail us and be threatened so that we can get really upset and anxious and freak out so that we behave in more adaptable ways that promote our survival. And I guess there's one or two ways you could look at that. Maybe I'm getting out of myself here, but that could either be the best realization you have of this whole episode. Yes. Or the worst, right? Or it depends on how you look at that. Yes. You have to define yourself in some way or another, right? We, we covered that in the ego episode, like, you have to pick some self-definition, and whatever self-definition you choose is going to be the definition that

fails at some point. And it is that failure that is evolutionarily useful. Because as soon as it fails, that is what motivates you to change your behavior and act differently in the future, which is, of course, your way of learning, right? So the learning is generally it's going to happen, you know, unless there are times where you can kind of live in denial. Sure, sure. You know, Freud had his defense mechanisms, which I think in many ways prevented learning. I think they were defined in such a way that it was like there were ways that people protected their ego in a way that prevented them from having to learn, right?

So it's like you develop a strong sense of denial or you project your own flaws on the other people as a way to protect your ego. And because you're protecting your ego, your ego never gets harmed. And because it never gets harmed, you never have to learn. and grow and develop a new self-definition. This comes back to the fact that it's just like growth is fundamentally rooted in pain. Failure is inevitable. No matter how you define your goals, your aims, your identity, you are choosing the future ways

in which you were going to fail. And so the game is not necessarily learning from failure because as long as you're just honest about failure, that's going to happen anyway. The game is not avoiding failure because that's impossible. The game is, is choosing the right goals and identity so that you have good failures. So that pain is worth it. Yeah. Okay.

Right. So a very crude example, if I define myself as a family man, right, that is a self-definition that I'm going to fail at at some point. Yeah. And each time I fail at that, I'm probably going to become better in my relationships, become more loving, better with intimacy, better with community. and become a better family man. If I define myself as a meth head,

I'm setting myself up for a series of failures that are not going to help me very much, right? I'm being very inefficient in sourcing meth in downtown L.A. right now, right? Yeah. Whereas if you define yourself as a family man, that pain is very informative and will guide you along the way

into becoming closer in line with your values or what you actually want to be and something that's very chosen and intentional. Correct. Okay. Before we can even talk about growing from failure, which we will talk about that towards the end of the episode, we have to talk about how are we defining ourselves because the way we define ourselves defines what our failures are going to be. Right. Right. I'm not a golfer.

So I don't give a shit if I miss a par puttut. Tiger Woods probably gives a lot of shit if he misses a part puttut, right? So for me it's not a failure. I don't care. Right. Tiger Woods, it's like it probably feels life or death to him at certain points. Yeah. I brought this up several times in the change episode.

I kept saying, you know, pain is a great teacher. Mm-hmm. And I think this is a little bit where rubber hits the road with it. Yeah. Pay attention to what's causing you pain. And if you, like, dig underneath of it, I think we're going to talk about this a lot. Yeah. But if you dig underneath of that, is that pain worth it?

Is that pain really what? Like the family man versus the meth head, right? which one of those pains is a better pain to have. Yes. Like, I think that's what I was trying to get at. What would you rather fail at? That's kind of what I was trying to get at in the change episode. Like, pain is a great teacher.

Like, listen to it. Don't avoid it. Because the chapter of my book is called Failure is the Way Forward. And this is why that just feels very surface level, you know, at this point because it's, yeah, it is the way forward. But it's the way forward for what, right? Okay. Like, if you are failing at something that is a waste of your time, it's probably good

you're failing, you probably don't want to move forward. And you see this a lot. Like, we're going to talk about quitting later and what the difference is between quitting being a success and quitting something being a failure. And I think a lot of it has to do with understanding, like, is something worth failing at? Is something worth pursuing in the first place? Because if it's not worth pursuing in the first place, then failure, like, failing at that thing is a good thing. I should, I should hope that I'm not very good at being a meth. Okay. I would hope so too.

Unfortunately, I'm prodigious at acquiring meth on the streets of L.A. Yeah. I just appear to be like Isaac Newton of... And yet here you are. Yet here I am, talking to you. Yeah. What are some good ways that you define failure for yourself throughout your life? And what are some bad ways?

Just professionally speaking, if I've, like, I guess I haven't been. been fired from really any jobs that I think of, but I've definitely failed. Not yet. Yeah. Yeah. Right. We'll talk about that. But when I have like, I've gone into something and I didn't, it just didn't work or I quit, you know, I left grad school.

Like I've talked about that plenty of times before. I never saw that as a failure. I did really see that as, oh, uh, the pain I was experiencing during that was pain I really didn't want. So I'm getting the hell out. Yeah. So I think that was a healthy way to see it. Every time that I have though, like an unhealthy way to see it as,

always been it's someone else's standard or someone else's definition that I've not lived up to. And I probably felt that sting that we're talking about, the sociometer sting. Yeah. And not really paid attention to why and just felt bad and just externalized all of it, thought that I was just a failure. And like, how could I live up to this, that, the other thing. It was always some external standard usually that I was failing to live up to. I think that's a big difference for me anyway. I don't know.

I definitely relate to that. When I think about it, I think about it like my early dating and relationships. Like I very much, I was like a very, I was very superficial. And that like I viewed my success at dating really just in terms of like how many women I went out with and how many I hooked up with. And what eventually happened, and I wrote about this in my dating book many years ago, what eventually happened is I realized that like I was putting so much time and effort into like pursuing women that I didn't even actually enjoy being around. It was because of what you're saying. It's like I had kind of downloaded this this lame cultural script of like what a successful dating life as a young man was and I was trying to live up to that regardless of how much I actually enjoyed the company of the women I was seen. And as soon as I flipped the standard of success from, I guess, hooking up with lots of girls to like being happy and enjoying the women I spend time with, it completely changed.

changed everything, right? And then it changed the nature of the failure, right? So it was like before, if I went on a date with a woman and she didn't call me back, that felt like a catastrophic evaluation of my worth as an individual. Whereas like when I shifted the metric to just like having a happy, good relationship with somebody and I went on a date with a woman and she didn't call me back, it was like, oh, well, I guess we wouldn't have been happy together. good things she didn't call me back, right? Like, it's no longer a failure. Like, texting her a million times and, like, manipulating her to go back out with me would have been the failure. Right. Because it would have made us both miserable. Right. And some people would say, oh, you're diluting yourself

and, you know, you're inflating your own ego or whatever and that's and you're diluting stuff. Well, you're deluding yourself either way. Yes. Right. There's a delusion on either direction on every vector. You may as well choose the one where it's telling you a better story and giving you a better outcome and is aligned with what you actually want, not what other people are telling you and all of those arbitrary standards that you're putting on yourself. You just make yourself miserable. Yeah. And it's, I think, the point that came up in the research, too, is that you're going to feel bad when other people judge you, whether you agree with them or not, whether you even care about them or not, it's just going to feel bad no matter what. So you might as well pick

the thing that's going to make you happy anyway, right? Like, you're going to get criticized no matter what you do. So you might as well do what's best for you. Yeah. No, that's totally true. I guess I get that. I don't know if I don't get a lot of overt signals like from my family. You know, like I'm not, I'm in my 40s. I'm not married. I'm not married. I don't have kids and all that kind of stuff. And I come from a pretty traditional family. Newly single ladies. Well, talk about a failure. I don't know if we have time in this podcast. That's another episode. That's another episode. I see that too, because I will tell myself, I'm like, well, I don't care what they think. And it's like, I actually do. You do. But when I sit down and think about it, I'm like, but I'm still okay. Even though that it kind of gets at me a little bit, I'm like, I'm still okay with like my choices and the way I've done this. And yeah, it's funny because, yeah, it never, things like that, they never stop getting to you. It's like the comments, right? Like, I get asked all the time by younger influencers, creators are like, when do you stop caring about? I'm like, you never stop. You just get better at it. Yeah. It's like public. speaking, right? You never stop being nervous before you go speak in front of an audience. It doesn't

bother you as much as time goes on. Like, you get desensitized to it. Like that, I think that's more of what happens. Yeah, I think that's where I'm at with it too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, believe it or not, we're going to go even deeper on this, which is way deeper than I think anybody asked for when they started this episode. But this is why we're here. Let's get weird. We go way too deep and get weird. Yeah. So in the next chapter, what I'd like listeners to do is think about one of the largest failures that they have experienced in the last few years. And take a moment and think about what are the assumptions or yardsticks that they are using to measure that failure? Like what's the underlying assumption or value that defines that failure?

In many cases, I think people don't realize that they didn't. actually accept the terms of their failure. Like they just kind of inherited it from the people around them. So that's the first thing I want them to do. But then I want them as we go into the next chapter and we start talking a little bit more deeply about this identity stuff and how we're measuring ourselves and the ego and where all this stuff comes from in the first place. And does any of it matter?

I want them to keep that in mind. as we work through it. So as you know, for many months, we've been joking about doing an episode on religion, religion solved. And surprisingly, a lot of people in the audience have encouraged us to do it. So this next chapter is going to be,

we're going to dip our toe in the water. And we're not going to get religious, but we are going to use two of the world's most prominent religions as a way of investigating how we define failure and how we define ourselves in the first place. Hold that thought. we've got a quick message from our sponsors.

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It's failure compared to what, right? What is the standard or expectation that you're setting that is defining your failure? So it is actually difficult to define failure without first looking at the standards and expectations we set for ourselves. And it turns out that those standards and expectations are very deeply linked with how we see who we are. And the best vehicle to explain this phenomenon and this experience that we all have, I actually think is one of the most popular religions in the world, which is Buddhism. I'm going to tell briefly the story of the Buddha again. I'm going to tell it with a little bit of a twist in a way that I think will help us understand failure and loss on a deeper and more profound level. So for people who don't know, the Buddha was born a prince to a very wealthy family.

And the Buddha's father was apparently a very bold and ambitious man. And when his son was born, he decided that he wanted to create an environment that his son would never. never know lack, would never know pain, would never know loss, would never know failure. And so he contrived everything in his son's environment to fulfill every wish, every desire. So supposedly, as the myth goes, as the Buddha grew up, he never wanted for anything. Anything he wanted at any time, it was immediately given to him. And he never had to deal with any problem. He never had to take responsibility for any struggle, any outcome. Everything was just easy. peasy, lemon breezy. Now, interestingly, this became very dissatisfying for him. I think he probably

intuited once he became an adult that this was kind of an empty life. Like, it was just this hedonic treadmill of indulgences and an ever escalating novelty. And at a certain point, he decided that he wanted to actually experience the world. And so late one night, he snuck out of the palace and he encounters four different people that all of them shock him. So the first one is an aging and withered old man. He had never seen somebody old before, and this kind of freaked him out. The second thing he saw was a deeply sick person, someone riddled with disease and deeply suffering because of it. The third thing he saw was a corpse on the side of the road. He'd never seen anybody who was dead before. And then the last thing he saw was a wandering ascetic,

which was at the time, it was a monk that gave away all possessions and just kind of wandered around, took a vow of poverty, I suppose. Now, all these things. completely shocked him. Like he had never been exposed to anything like this in his life and it kind of gave him a wake up call and he realized, you know what? I got to get out into the world. I need to learn and understand everything that's going on that I haven't been exposed to before. So soon after, he planned to exit the palace for good. He had a wife and a child. He left him in the middle of the night without saying goodbye to them. And he decided to wander the wilderness as an ascetic himself. He gave up all possessions. He took a vow of poverty. He supposedly lived on like a single peanut

each day. He basically intensely suffered intentionally for an extended period of time. Intentionally suffering isn't really satisfying either. It's just kind of another form of indulgence, just, you know, with a different flavor, I suppose. And so eventually he came to the conclusion that like, this wasn't really leading anywhere either. And so that's when he, he went and sat underneath the Bodhi tree and he decided that he was not going to get up until he had a better idea. And that's when he became enlightened. I find this story interesting because earlier we were talking about kind of the Hegelian dialectic, the thesis, the antithesis, the synthesis, the synthesis. I think we could look at the Buddhist story of kind of an example of that

dialectic at work, right? So you have this prince who's born into a life of luxury. He has zero problems, zero failures, right? That's kind of our natural influence. instinct is to avoid any loss or failure, that is not satisfying because you don't grow, you don't have accountability for anything, you don't have any repercussions for anything, you never have to change. And that's not living. That's not a life. Right. So he becomes dissatisfied with that. And then he goes to the other extreme, which is he seeks out failure. He seeks out pain. He seeks out loss. And he tries to indulge and optimize that suffering to achieve some degree of enlightenment or self-empowerment. And he realizes that, too, is a dead end. That is just another

form of self-indulgence. And it is also an unhealthy relationship with failure and loss. And so the synthesis that he arrives at, I guess you could say under the Bodie tree, is that everything is a sense of loss. Everything is an eventual failure. Because the moment you attach yourself to any thought, any desire, any identity, identification, you are defining the terms of your future failure because nothing lasts and because nothing lasts, anything that you attach yourself to is destined to fail you at some point. From a Buddhist perspective, every time you say I am and then finish the sentence, you are committing a very subtle act of self-harm because you are setting the standards and

expectations by which you're going to measure yourself. And by definition, every measurement and standard you set for yourself is one day going to fail you. So as soon as you are as you define yourself in any way, shape, or form, you are also defining the terms of your future failures. So in this sense, failure is not only inevitable, it is a fundamental part of our consciousness and the way we experience the world. Now, the Buddhist response to this is that you just shouldn't define yourself at all, that you should let go of all attachments, all standards, all expectations. And this is a pretty radical idea. I mean, this is a very radical idea. I mean, this ultimately is the realization that the Buddha came to sitting underneath the

Bodhi tree and became the kind of the foundational premise of the philosophy of Buddhism. But I do think there is a lot of wisdom in that of at least defining yourself extremely loosely and not being too invested or too attached to any single definition of self. Because the more invested you are in any definition of self, the more you bank your self esteem or how you feel about yourself on any single narrow definition, the more vulnerable you're making yourself for when the eventual failures do occur. I'm not really going to recommend that everybody goes full Buddhist and just like sits in a corner and stares at a wall and tries to let go relinquish every single form of identification and attachment in their lives. I don't think that's necessarily practical in 2026,

But I do think it's an incredibly important principle to understand. And I think as a mental exercise, it is useful for people to kind of explore this idea that a lot of their self-definition and a lot of the standards and expectations that they've invited into their lives are completely arbitrary, are completely self-defined, and don't necessarily need to exist. Like you can kind of just stop measuring yourself in certain ways. technically whenever you want. Right. Okay. So you're advocating for Buddhism light. Yes. It kind of sounds like a diet Buddhism. So this kind of leads to the four noble truths of Buddhism, right? Like the first

noble truth being life is suffering or some sort of dissatisfaction that's just inherent in life. The second noble truth, I think, was that we create a lot of that suffering though too. And this is kind of what you're getting at is that these attachments that we have or these identities that we identify with or these things that we call ourselves, that creates some sort of, inevitable future failure that you're talking about that will generate more suffering for us if we hold on to them so tightly. So you're not advocating necessarily going and sitting under the Bodie tree and reaching full of enlightenment, although if you can, great, right? But just being aware of that, being aware of those attachments and the failures they're setting you up for is something that can be

useful for us because we can not attach to them so tightly if we're more aware of them. Is that what you're Whenever we pursue something or we're interested in something, I think we're psychologically predisposed to only see the upside of the success of that thing while we tend to ignore the inevitable failure of that thing. The inherent inevitable failure. Okay, yeah. And what's funny, too, is like, I think it's really important for the listener to get this, too. Like, this isn't just about trying to achieve something and failing.

Like, it's not like trying to lose some weight and not quite losing it. Like, sometimes the failure is precipitated. by succeeding at the thing, right? So like, let's say I want to become a parent and I want to, I want to parent a child. Well, if I parent successfully, I'm going to raise a healthy independent adult who's no longer to need me around anymore, which it means like being a successful parent means you no longer have to parent somebody. So even success can hold the seeds of failure.

Correct. And you're just kind of screwed either way. Correct. Yeah. And this is like, and I mean, this is what is so powerful about the first noble truth is like, everything is imperman. Every single thing. Nothing lasts.

Everything goes away at some point. And it goes away whether you succeed at it, it goes away whether you fail at it, it goes away no matter what. So anything you attach yourself to, anything you define yourself by, you are tacitly signing up for the thing that is going to eventually disappoint you or the thing that you're eventually going to grieve. I mean, that sounds kind of dark and sad, but like it's inevitable. Right. Right. So it's it's not necessarily a sad thing. So the question then becomes what is worth doing even though you know you will probably lose it one day, right? It is for I think for many people, it's like being a parent is worth it even though they understand that one day they're not going to be a parent anymore. I think about this, you know, with marriage, right? There is going to come a day where either my wife or I die before the other one, right? And it's it's still worth doing though, even though. Even though. you know that that is going to eventually happen. It becomes a very useful compass for people to think about what they invest themselves into. Because last chapter, we both gave some examples of like very superficial things that we pursued, really just to kind of like win a little bit of status

and approval from others and how empty that is. I think this is kind of the rubric for how do you pursue something that is really worthwhile over the long run. You know, the third noble truth is that it is possible to escape suffering, right? Even if you lose something, even if you fail at it. And then the fourth noble truth is how you do that, the eightfold path, what they call this is how you live in order to do that. Again, what you're saying is you don't have to sit under the Bodhi tree and become enlightened to do that.

Is this what they mean by, I'm kind of becoming an amateur Buddhist. Okay. I've been looking into it before this episode even started. Yeah. Is this what they mean by the middle way? Is this what I don't know if I completely understand the middle way in Buddhism. Is that what they, do you know about this at all? It's very similar. It's very Aristotlian. Like it's like any pursuit there is you will kind of naturally be there's a magnetic pull towards either extreme, right? There's there's always a tendency of like you should try to go out and make all the money or you should just never not care about money at all, right? Where it's like actually the way of non attachment is understanding that money matters, but it's also not everything. Right. So there's always kind of this. Okay. The virtue is found in the balance. That's the Aristotlian view. But in the

In the Buddhist view, it's the middle way, which is how you become non-attached as seeing both of those simultaneously. Yeah. And we talked about this a little bit in the values episode where it is actually a highly functional person, you have almost like a balance of power of values within you. Like you have this tension between all the different things that you value in your life and you often have to make compromises between them. Whereas like an unhealthy individual is when one value kind of takes over and becomes a

tyrant and every other value or thing of importance has to be sacrificed to that single value. Like that's that's where dysfunction comes from. That's where imbalance comes from. And Aristotle would say that would that would mean living unvirtuously. And then a Buddhist would say that you have become attached to something. And that is the root of your suffering as a result. Right. Okay. There's kind of two other principles that I think are worth touching on that kind of flow out of this idea that failure is an inevitable side effect of. just setting standards or expectations for yourself. So the first one is, is that failure is relative and it's relational. There's never just failure in a vacuum. It's always failure compared to what,

right? What is the expectation or standard that you have set? And then what is the gap between what happened and that outcome? I think everybody has had a series of these experiences throughout their lives where like something has happened to you and it initially felt like a failure because it didn't meet the expectation you had in that moment. But then as you kind of processed it and thought about it, you suddenly realized, like, wait, this is actually a really good thing. Oh, I'm actually glad this happened. This isn't a failure at all, right? Like, we've all had that experience before.

I think one of the most profound and world-changing versions of this was Alexander Fleming. So Fleming was a biologist, and he was studying bacterial cultures. And he went on vacation. He accidentally forgot to seal. some of the bacteria that he was studying. And so I guess the petri dishes became overgrown with mold while he was gone. So when he came back,

the specimens that he was studying were ruined by a bunch of mold. And so by the standard of a biologist studying bacteria, he had actually failed spectacularly. He had like destroyed dozens of samples by leaving them out and not protecting them appropriately.

But what he noticed, after he kind of cleaned everything up, is he noticed that where the mold was, bacteria wouldn't grow in its place. And this eventually led to the discovery of penicillin, which is derived from a form of mold. And penicillin has arguably gone on and saved probably more lives than maybe almost anything. The first antibiotic, yeah. It's the first antibiotic.

I mean, it's like saved hundreds of millions of lives, maybe even a billion lives. Who knows? And this was discovered as a failure. It was a form of failure. But if you move the goalposts, it's actually one of the greatest successes in human history. This sort of stuff happens everywhere. I mean, I see it like in our business. This industry, podcasting, online content, media, everything, it is changing so fast. I mean, how many times do I change our business strategy? By the end of the month, I'm not even sure what we're measuring anymore. Sometimes, yeah, because we have to. Yeah, sometimes I feel bad for the team. I feel like the team gets whiplash because it's like every other quarter. I'm like, okay, guys, we're changing everything. We're going to look at something completely different now. But what happens so often is it's like you define standards and expectations for the quarter or for the year.

And then you get to June and you're like, oh, this actually isn't what we should be optimizing for anymore. We need to change our definition of success. And that means we need to change our downstream strategy. And you run into this in romantic relationships as well. I would say the majority of fights within a romantic relationship is the downstream result of either two people having different expectations about certain things. or one person failing to shift their expectations about something based on new evidence or a new experience. So failure is inevitable, failure is relative and relational. And the last one is that failure is therefore arbitrary. It is a made-up concept. The idea that Alexander Fleming failed

as a biologist is a completely made-up definition. The idea that a golfer failed because he missed a put is completely made up. Putting a ball in a hole 400 yards away, like this is a completely arbitrary construct that a bunch of people came together and just agreed was important. And it's not real. Back to the Buddhist view,

it is illusory. Everything is illusory, right? It's like this podcast success is illusory, right? Whether we get a quarter of a million downloads or half a million downloads or a million downloads, whether that is success or failure, it's an arbitrary number that we make up. And we make it up so that we can either feel good or bad about what we did and what happened.

At any moment, we can decide to measure success in a different way and then feel differently about ourselves. And so this raises the question of like, if you are feeling like a failure in your life, if you are feeling like you are consistently failing to measure up to some standard or expectation, where did that standard or expectation come from? when did you adopt it? Like, who says that you have to have it? You don't, right? Like, I think we adopt so many of our standards without realizing that we adopted them.

And then we have them for so long, we assume that they are capital T true when really it's just another arbitrary narrative that we decided to identify with. Yeah, you see this all the time, right? Like, people are, oh, my God, I'm like 35. and I haven't bought a home yet. And it's like, okay, what standard are you, where you should have a home by 35 or whatever it is, you know? Are you measuring yourself by like the boomers who could just houses were practically

handed out on a street corner or are you measuring yourself by 21st century standards where there's not enough homes anywhere, right? So it's like, what are you measuring by? It's just kind of like the water we swim in though a lot of times, right? We're just like, this is what people do. And so we do it. Not realizing that just that's setting us up for a lot of that suffering and anguish that the Buddhists talk about, like you're attaching to something and you don't even know what you're

attaching to. If you choose something and you fail by it, that's one thing. But when it's just kind of handed to you and you're just doing it blindly, that's kind of another level of suffering, too, I think. I do want to note one thing, though, because what we are talking about right now, I think is a very profound realization for people when they first have it, you know, whether it's when they go to therapy or, you know, when they meditate for the first time or whatever. Like, the first time you kind of realize this of like, oh my God, I bought into all these scripts without really realizing I bought into them and they are arbitrary and I don't have to accept them. It is a very, very powerful personal experience that I think most people go through.

There's a little bit of pushback I want to put out there, which is that once people realize this is there's a tendency to think, well, we can just define anything however we want, right? Like, we can, don't tell me what tall means or what rich means or what poor means. I can just decide what anything means myself, and then you can't tell me whether I'm right or wrong. So while that is philosophically true, I think for a society to function well and a culture to be beneficial for the majority of people within it, people do have to come together and agree on some terms and definitions. If everybody has a different definition of everything, then you can't coordinate. And if you can't coordinate, then you don't get the benefits of being a sense.

social species, right? You don't get all the, all the good things that come with being part of a larger social group. So again, from my amateurish Buddhist understanding, I think they address this as well. They distinguish between the relative and the ultimate, I think is what they call it. They're just different names for it. But the relative is like the world that we have to navigate and live within and try to be in harmony with one another. And that's kind of what you're talking about. There's actually, hold on, you know, you can't just be making up all the rules all the time. We all have to agree on a few things. That's what they call the relative kind of. this human world that we have to interact with each other, whereas the ultimate, like you're saying,

the philosophical truth is actually no, these are all arbitrary and made up. And there's a recognition of that. I think, again, that kind of comes back to that middle way, though, recognizing both. Again, this is my amateur Buddhist understanding. Yeah, no, I think that's accurate. And I think a good example of this is imagine there's a golf tournament with a bunch of PGA pros. And all the PGA pros come together and they're like, you know what, this whole golf thing, it's totally made up. I'm going to change the definition of a birdie. I'm going to change a definition of a driver. I'm going to change a definition of a sand track. This isn't a par four. It's par six. Yeah, it's like every individual golfer is like, well, you can't tell me what a birdie is. I have my

own definition. You can't invalidate my truth. It's like, okay, well, now the golf game means nothing, right? You completely, you've like destroyed the entire activity because there is no definitional agreement across like what certain terms are. You don't want to be so attached that you forget that this is all just a bunch of made up stuff and you don't necessarily have to buy into everything. But at the same time, you can't just tell the world to fuck off and imagine anything that's true for yourself. Anything you feel like is true for yourself is true. That's not really going to be helpful either. That's a form of attachment itself, right?

It's attachment to yourself. Right. Attachment to your own definitions. Yeah. To kind of wrap this all up, if I had to define what failure is, I would say really what we do is we define success as an arbitrary and temporary arrangement. of certain standards and circumstances. And then failure is just the moment that reality fails to live up to that circumstantial arrangement.

And on a long enough timeline, the failure rate of everything is 100%. So there is no arrangement of circumstances that you or I could imagine that will always exist. Western psychology, too, has also kind of come to the same conclusion around this whole attaching to identity thing and all that. But when it comes to like well-being, for instance, Jennifer Crocker back in the 2000s, she came up with this idea of like self-worth and identity. The moment that you decide your worth depends on any domain in your life. Again, it's kind of like that attachment. That is just setting you up for where the failure is going to be the most destructive in your life. Right. So if you say my job is the thing that, you know, that defines my self-worth the

most or my relationship or whatever it is, you know, whatever hobby you have or, or talent or anything like that, that's going to be kind of the ground zero for any sort of like damage or any sort of threat to that is going to hurt the most. And the more you, you double down on one or you single out one area of your life or anything like that, the more risk you're setting yourself up for. You actually wrote an article about this a long time ago, right? That, um, diversify your identity. diversify your identity, right? Yeah. Right. The identity side, too, there's other researchers who clear back in the 80s, like they,

they were thinking about this too. Like, if you define yourself through fewer and more concentrated roles, the blast zone for any of those when it does get, inevitably does get blown up, these people, they suffer more from like anxiety, depression, all the well-being metrics you can think of. Basically, concentrating your identity or your self-worth in any one of these areas is going to lead to catastrophe 100% of the time at some point. There's a tendency to for people to be like, we'll just succeed at it all the time then. Well, again, there's an inevitability of the impermanence of it at some point. These like fixed labels even too, maybe it's not a domain in your life,

but it's just a trait that you have. Like, I'm talented, I'm smart, I'm beautiful, whatever it is, right? Any one of those is going to fail you at some point. And attaching too hard to them, the Western psychology bears this out too. It took them a couple thousand years to catch up to the Houdis, but they figured it out too. So if we haven't lost all the people yet who got turned off by the religion, just know that there's actually some science behind it too. We still have a chance to lose them here. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Because we're not done with the religion yet. But yeah, but if you think about this, though, like, you could even put all three of these together. Like, think of somebody who is like nothing but their job title, right? And so they stick their

self-worth on that domain, whatever. They're in finance or they're in, you know, whatever. They identify with that so much, too. Like, that's their identity. And, and, and, and, and, And they believe that their talent or their intelligence or whatever is what makes all of that possible for them. What happens when they get fired or there's a market crash? You remember seeing this back in like 2008, right? The financial crash. Like people committed suicide.

Right. Every, yeah, every massive market crash, there's a bunch of Wall Street guys that off themselves. Yeah, yeah. That's their sole identity. They based it on their intelligence that I'm a really smart person. So I'm going to go into finance and I'm going to stake my whole identity. I'm a finance guy. And I make a lot of money.

That's who I am. Right. That's an obvious example, but it happens all the time. Yeah, there was an interesting news story about a guy who killed himself in New York a number of years ago. And I remember reading about it. And I think this is like, you know, because everybody hears that there's always a bunch of Wall Street people that end up committing suicide after a financial crash. And I think that's what they don't realize is that people in finance, it's not just it's not just the money. In a lot of cases, it's their sense of competence. It's their sense of self-worth. But people don't understand that. that if you're a really successful guy in finance, you're not just investing your own money. You're not just investing in your company's money. You're investing your family's money. You're investing your friend's money. You're investing your neighbor's money. That literally is your identity. It is your identity. So all those people, those people, that's what they see me as. Right. And it's like if the market starts crashing, it's like the guy across the street's like banging on your door being like, did you get out in time? Did you get out of time?

And if you lost everything, right? Now, you have to go to all those people you love and care about in your life and tell them that you lost all of their savings. Yeah. So for us to sit here and say, well, I would never do that. Well, you don't have your identity wrapped up like they did. Yeah. Okay. But have you ever done this?

Have you ever stick your identity on too much? I feel like you're, you kind of spread out quite a bit. Are there certain things? I don't know. I don't think I'm very diversified. Oh, you don't. Okay. I don't.

Okay. I don't. Yeah, I'm definitely more focused these days. I think when I was younger, maybe it was a little more diversified. But yeah, these days, I, I'm, dude, I'm becoming so boring and repetitive. Like I just, I work. I hang out with like the same five people. I hang out with my wife. I play some video games. Like, that's kind of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of, that's kind of all I've got going on. So if one of those legs got knocked out. Oh, yeah. I mean, you would be devastated,

you think? I know I haven't done anything and I don't think I will do anything that could potentially get me canceled. But like, oh yeah. You know, if if I got canceled, if my career got massively jeopardize, yeah, it would be, it would be a deep, deep cut. Yeah. For sure. Like, there's a lot of my identity. Oh, I bet. Well, and there's a lot of people depend on you do. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I can sympathize with that. I could definitely see that. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like as I get older, I've loosened a lot of those. I've talked about this before. Like, I've, I had that identity as like, oh, I wanted to be the smart guy. That was kind of like me getting out of certain situations. Like being smart is going to get me out of these situations and it'll get me

things that I need and, you know, satisfy some of those basic needs that I had. And that worked for a long time. But then I started to see it fail. And I think luckily I kind of like have slowly loosened my grip on that. It used to be like any slight to my intelligence. I took it very, very personally, right? And that's another thing you'll see with somebody who over-identifies with something is that they take everything very personally around that domain. I still have plenty of attachments, sure. We're going to talk later about what are good things to identify with. Like, what are good failures to sign up for? And I think that's an example of a bad failure to sign up for because it is based on metrics outside of yourself, right? Like you're you're essentially basing

how you view yourself on the perceptions of others or or the ability of others. It came in to start contrast to like when I go to grad school and everybody smart around you, that doesn't mean anything anymore at that point. So you're like, well, I got to find something else, I guess. I had the same experience in music school. Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah. Right. Right. my whole identity when I was a teenager and then I went to music school and I was just yeah everybody's talented everybody it's like and half the guys in my class were so much better than I was and it just man it was a brutal hit to the ego like I said I feel like I have fewer and fewer identities as it maybe it's because I'm an amateur Buddhist too though there you go you are you're getting pretty deep down down the meditation rapid oh man we'll get into that so if we haven't lost everybody with the religious talk yet There's still time, Drew. There's still time to fail in this chapter. I want to pivot to Christianity because I think there are some really interesting concepts in Christianity that have a lot to say about failure and the management of failure and atoning for failures. As an atheist, I personally would

characterize Christianity as a very efficient atonement technology or set of practices. the same way I think Buddhism is a set of practices to like loosen the the ties of identity and like loosen that identification with things. I've come to appreciate Christianity as a set of practices to help one manage the inevitable fallout of our failures and disappointments. Okay. I'm interested to see where you go with this. So I actually want to start with the definition of sense. So I mean, as we've talked on this podcast before, I grew up in the church. I grew up going to church all the time.

I'm very, very familiar with the Bible. One of the concepts I always hated when I was younger was this concept of original sin, which is this idea in Christianity that people are born sinful and you can only be redeemed by coming to Jesus and asking for forgiveness. As a teenager, I thought this was the most fucked up thing that you could tell people, that you're essentially telling people that there's something inherently wrong with them and there's nothing you can do to fix it other than pray to God and pray to Jesus.

And yeah, I think on one level that is probably not the best message to be disseminating. Like it is, well, let's just say it's a little culty. But as I've gotten older and I've done a little bit of a deeper research into some of these things

and especially prepping for this episode, I came across some things that made me think about original sin in a little bit of a different way. So the first thing is that I think the popular contemporary idea of sin is that you did something wrong, that you are a bad person, right? Like, we think of sin. Like, if I say the word sin, what do you think of? I've, like, you know, fornication and stealing something. Yeah, yeah. Hitted, like, violence, hitting somebody.

Murder, like, yeah, all the horrible things that people do, yeah. Like, I, I almost equated, it's like, it's like, it's like crime, essentially, right? What's interesting is that sin, if you look at the, the origins, of the word sin. It actually, it comes from an ancient Greek word that was used in archery. And the word sin was, was the word that, that described an arrow that missed the bullseye. So like the gap, I guess the, that gap in which you missed, that was the sin, right? So it didn't hit where you were aiming. Exactly.

So it is, interestingly, the origination of the word sin is much more attuned and aligned with the idea of failure or missing expectations of trying to live up to some sort of standard or outcome and just falling short. And so the idea of original sin, if you take all the things we just discussed about Buddhism, that no matter how you define yourself, you are also defining your future failures, you're defining all of the standards and outcomes that you're going to fail to live up to and how that's inevitable and unavoidable and there's nothing you can do about it because it is just a ingrained piece of your psychology, you could call that original sin, right? It's like we are all born with this sense of self that we can never fully live up to. The only way to atone for that

is through some radical form of self-forgiveness. That understanding of Christianity, I was like, Oh. It's a little more palatable. Tell me more. Okay, okay. This is way more interesting. I think the backbone of Christian theology, there is a very manipulative. culty way of looking at it, which is kind of what I described earlier. But I also think there is kind of a profound psychological way of looking at it as well, which is that we are all hampered with this kind of inherent sense of guilt and shame of the fact that we will never be able to fully live up to the standards we set for ourselves, that no matter what we pursue in our lives, it is going to slip through our fingers at some point, that the failure rate of everything is 100

It is always going to be difficult to deal with that and wrestle with that. Whether or not anything is our fault, we are always going to wrestle with certain feelings of guilt and shame around that. And what is the cleanser of guilt and shame? It is a radical form of compassion and forgiveness for ourselves. If Buddhism nailed the psychological explanation of why we struggle so much with feelings of inadequacy and anxiety and failure. and doubt and all these things, I think Christianity nailed the solution, right? Which is kind of this radical self-compassion

or this radical self-forgiveness. What's also super interesting about Christianity is that it has this baked-in mechanism of confession, which I guess in some ways you could say it was like the predecessor of therapy, of talk therapy. Yeah, yeah. Which I never really thought about before

until we worked on this episode. I was like, huh, interesting. We didn't just invent therapy out of nowhere. Like we've actually, the church has been doing this for like 2,000 years. There's a funny story around confession, which is that Martin Luther, the guy who kicked off the reformation, apparently he was such a neurotic mess. He was a monk in a monastery in Erfurt and in the early 1500s when he was younger. And apparently he was such a neurotic self-loathing mess that he would catalog and document

all of his failings with such minute detail that his confessions would often last up to six, five, six, seven hours at a time. And it got to the point where like every thought that he had that was wrong, every like minute tiny mistake that like eventually one of the confessors, one of the priests like pulled him aside and was like, look man, you don't really have any problems.

He's like, I'm talking to people who like fucking killed somebody like cheated on their wives. You're coming in and telling me that you feel bad because like the rice was undercooked last night. You know, like it's they had a little bit of a come to Jesus moment, no pun intended, of like, I'm like, dude, you don't really have any problems. You're kind of just making this shit up and you're abusing yourself. I don't remember exactly what the confessor told them, but there is a great line in there about how forgiveness is not merely this external thing that happens to you. It is part of it is learning to develop a tolerance and an understanding of your own shortcomings. So if you think of confession in terms of being a technique or even a technology, right, for

alleviating the guilt and shame of failure, I think there's actually a really interesting kind of scientific explanation for this. And I'd put therapy in the same category, which if you go back to the sociometer theory that we talked about last chapter, right, that we are, there's like something innate within each of us that we are always subconsciously measuring ourselves and how much value we have relative to the tribe and that a lot of what we experience is our self-esteem is a reflection of that sociometer, right? If you fail at something and then you go talk to somebody else about it, one of two things is going to happen and maybe both. First thing that's going to happen

is if that person listens to you, empathizes with you, and accepts you despite your failure, that probably repairs your sociometer. It reassures you of like, okay, I have not lost status with the tribe. I'm not a total loser. I'm not going to get kicked out tomorrow. Thank God. I'm okay. The second thing it can do is that it can alert you to whether you had an unhealthy

or an inaccurate expectation or outcome that you are working towards, right? Because if you think about like part of the value of therapy or just talking to anybody is the empathy that you get, right? That there is a certain amount of healing in that. But another aspect of it is like beating yourself up over something and then you go talk to somebody and they're like, well, why are you beating yourself up over that? Like, why is that success to you? That doesn't make sense.

My definition is completely different. Goes back to the definitions. Right. And then you hear their definition. You're like, oh, I was being crazy. I, this is like, that's completely off base. I should have seen it this way the entire time. So I think the magic of what Freud called the talking cure, I think is largely, it's a combination of both of those things.

It is seeing that you are not going to be socially punished, that you're not being ostracized, and then also having the ability to recalibrate your expectations in such a way that the failure maybe doesn't look like such a failure anymore. Again, if we haven't lost the people who are turned off by the religion, that bears out in like the psychological research. as well. And you're right, you made the parallel with therapy. That's exactly what it does. And then it's, it's not only that, but just like disclosure in general, any distressful event, not, maybe it's not a failure, just anything that's bothering you and getting it out there, it seems to have some sort of beneficial effect all across the board. And it's not just catharsis. It's not just getting it off your chest, too. There is some form of processing, which is exactly what you're talking about. Like there has to, you can't just vent to somebody,

like venting is fine, sure. But there, there has to be some sort of, of like processing that happens with it. Penny Baker back in the 90s, he did all this research on this and did this whole meta-analysis around it and kind of like basically the form of the confessional where you have an audience and you're not just doing it to yourself.

Journaling's good, processing on your own is good, but actually putting it out there precisely because of what you're talking about. Like that sociometer theory that we have. It's like we have to in our minds, put ourselves back into the group and be okay and accept it in some way. When you think about this,

a friend comes to you, and they're like, oh man, I feel awful about this. Usually what you're like, you're like, dude, like, take it easy on yourself. And that has a lot of reparative effects that we've seen. There's also the cost of like not disclosing things too. If we keep all of that in, you end up doing it. That's where the rumination often comes in, right? That's where the open loops stay open and you can't quite close them.

And so there's always that going on in the background, you know, of your mind. There's a physical aspect to it too. Body keeps the score of vessel. Bander Colk, a lot of that is real. There's all sorts of effects of not disclosing versus disclosing. Again, though, it's not just the catharsis. There's got to be a processing element to it. From what I recall, a lot of Pina Baker's research on journaling in particular found that it was,

journaling was most beneficial when you specifically journaled about something that bothered you. Like, you couldn't just sit down and just dump all your thoughts and ideas. I mean, I'm sure there's some value in that. but like it was specifically when you journaled about some issue in your life that was really eating at you, that is when you saw the benefits of it. And it wasn't just the facts of what's eating you, too, but the emotions and the integration between the facts and the emotions. This is what happened.

That's a very important part of it. This is how I felt about it. And then there were continue, if you did it over several sessions too, and the story developed over time and you were able to integrate it and tell a more coherent story over time about that. That helped a lot too. You can do that a lot better with someone else. I think that's why therapy works for some people, for a lot of people, around something that you can tell a coherent story about and eventually make sense of both the factual and the emotional side of it.

So yeah. In the case of confession and the church, the power is that radical forgiveness, right? It's like you go, you go sit with the priest or whatever. You tell the priest all the awful things that you've done. The priest, you know, consoles you, reassures you and says, you're forgiven. God still loves you. Jesus loves you, whatever, right? There's probably some sort of like cleansing effect that comes with that.

It's closer to it. Yeah. The other thing that I thought about while you were talking is when we hold things in, those standards and metrics by which we measure ourselves, they seem to kind of drift and they drift into like irrational areas. And it's only by like saying it out loud. I mean, I'm sure you've had this experience a million times, right? Where it's like you've thought something.

You're really anxious about something. And then you like just go to say it out loud. And as soon as the words come out of your mouth, you're like, wow, I'm being ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's really interesting about that too is that they do find that the listener in that situation, if they have two qualities, it tends to do the best as well. One of them is compassion, which you've already said.

The other one is being assertive, though, too. So this, I have a friend in particular when I am thinking those kinds of like crazy thoughts or whatever. I'll call her up. And she's like, she'll sit and listen. listen, and then she'll immediately come back to me and be like, what are, like, this is why this is crazy. So there's a compassionate, and this is, the confessional is set up like this, like priests where they're trained to be like this, be compassionate, know that we're all sinners, quote unquote,

sinners, right? But then also they have a code by which they live and they say, this is, this is how you should go about it. So there's an assertiveness to it as well. So you're absolutely right. Like it's like, yeah, getting out loud, you might hear it yourself, but someone else could reflect back to you how crazy it is to and be assertive enough where they can be like, look, I get where you're coming from, but at the same time, too, you're being fucking stupid. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, that's actually very, very valuable.

So it's not, again, it's not just catharsis and getting it out there. It's some sort of reflection and processing that has to happen around it. Yeah. I remember I met a woman years ago. And I remember she came up to me after an event once. This was like a kind of a business event. And she told me that she really wanted to start a family, but she felt like she couldn't until she was professionally.

financially secure and she was just afraid that she was going to run out of time. And it was a conference with like a lot of successful people. So I was just and I kind of looked at it. I'm like, you're probably fine. Like in my head, I'm like, she's probably fine. So I was like, okay, when would you be financially and professionally successful enough to to be able to comfortably have a child? Yeah. Where's your standard? Where's your definition here? And her definition was a million dollars a year. Okay. She thought that was bare minimum. Okay. To like raise a kid. To raise a kid. Okay. And it's always tough because you like, you don't want to like laugh in people's faces. But, you know, I remember I was like, okay, that's interesting. Why, why a million? And then she

started going through all the reasons. She was like, well, you know, either my husband and I would, we'd want to quit working. We'd want to have a nanny. We'd want to like go to a private school, like blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, everything you just described like that you're maybe at like 300k, maybe at most. Like if you're in a really expensive neighborhood, where's the, this other 700K coming from? Like, I actually tried to do the math with her and it just kept coming up so short. I told her, I was like, it's, it's clear that this is, there's a lot of fear here and you are overcompensating with an extremely large number in your head. And you were defining success as this absurdly large number to compensate for that, that irrational fear that's going on.

I was like, where do you think that fear is coming from? And sure enough, it turned out she grew up very poor and was like, you know, father went broke when she was young and the family, you know, like lived in a car for a couple months and had this like torrid story from her past. And I was like, got it. Okay. That's, so it's the extremity of the number is, is, it's proportional to your internal emotions. It's not, it has nothing to do with the spreadsheet. I was like, first of all, that's completely understandable given where you come from.

But you should listen to the spreadsheet. That's an arbitrary standard. She adopted without knowing, without knowing it. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. And so, yeah, we're reflecting it back to somebody and hopefully seeing it right in front of your face. It was funny, too, because I remember, I remember asking her, I was like, how many people do you know who have had kids and don't make a million dollars a year? And she was like, she was like, oh, everybody. Yeah, 100% of people. And I was like, how many of those kids are fine? And she was just kind of like, oh, yeah, good point. Right. Right. Yeah.

But it's funny. I mean, your brain plays tricks with you, right? And it's coming back to that Buddhist point of the attachments, right? You know, it's like that attachment is, probably deep-seated in her from a very young age of like this intense anxiety around money and an overcompensation around money. And it's probably been there for so long that she like forgets that it's there. She doesn't realize, you know, people don't really talk about money a whole lot. So like she doesn't have people to measure herself against or maybe she only hangs around people who are super rich. And so her measurement of what's acceptable is like gotten completely out of whack and she doesn't realize it because she's not confessing.

You can get attached to independence. You can get attached to non-attachment even too, right? That's always one of my favorite ones that I point out myself sometimes. And it goes kind of similar to that story. Like when I was growing up, I just realized so many different situations where it's like, oh, I'm on my own. And so like independence became a value of mine or like a standard by which I measured a lot of my life. And then I see it start failing as I get older too. That's another one. Like with the being smart thing and the independence thing, then starts failing you too at some point. When I was younger and I was really into Buddhism and meditation,

I started to notice that. So some of the retreat centers and stuff that I used to go to, like the hardcore regulars, there was a little bit of a status game among them, right? You know, so you kind of hang out with these people after a retreat and, you know, they'd be like bragging about the month of silence that they did or how they were meditating three hours a day or whatever. And they're, you know, it just kind of became another dick measuring contest

to see who was going to get enlightened first. that I'm like, this is just the same thing. Like this is another version of attachment. I just heard this. I think this is the term used for that as Zen stink. Isn't that what they call it? Zen stink. I think it is where it's like, oh, look at how quickly I'm becoming enlightened or on my

on the path to enlightenment or whatever it is. Yeah, they call it Zen stink. But it's a real problem. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's, I mean, and it goes back to like the sociometer follows you everywhere. It is human nature to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No matter what environment you put yourself in, you will start measuring yourself against the people in your environment. Your brain is a big comparison machine. It is. Basically is what it is, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no matter what it is, no matter what the comparison is. So at the end of the last chapter, I asked the listener to think about a major recent failure and kind of consider where they got the definition of that being a failure. I think with this chapter, really what to think is, first, where did that definition of failure come from?

that it come from themselves, did it come from somebody outside of them? Were they aware that they were accepting that definition, that expectation? And then I think the second piece would be, what is their mechanism for finding atonement or finding compassion or forgiveness for that failure? Who have they shared their feelings with?

And if they have shared the failure with somebody, I'm curious if they ended up finding out that their expectation or their metric was maybe a little bit out of whack, a little bit irrational. But the point of all of this, is that failure is inevitable, failure is relative and relational, and failure is arbitrary, it's self-defined. But it's also guaranteed.

It's a structural, fundamental part of our psychological machinery. It is the inherent price that we pay for caring about anything, for pursuing anything, which I think makes us land with a much better question than we probably started this episode with, which is that it's not about how to fail less, it's about figuring out what is worth failing for, what is worth doing despite the inevitability of failure happening. And that is what we're going to get into in next chapter. Hold that thought.

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I could probably count on one hand how many tennis games I have watched in my entire life. Andre Agassiz's memoir is fantastic. It's so good. The opening line is I hate tennis, which is like from the first sentence, you were like, okay, I need to know more, right? You're just absolutely hooked. What's great about the book, other than his incredible self-awareness and self-disclosure, is he had a crazy life. So for people who don't know, Andre Agassi, he's one of the best tennis players who ever lived.

His father was an Iranian immigrant, came over to the U.S. in the 1970s. He was a former professional boxer, and he decided, before Andre was born, he decided that his son was going to be the number one tennis player in the world. So as soon as Andre could walk and hold a racket, he was playing tennis. Now, Andre's father was such a psycho. He took one of those tennis ball machines that, like, shoots balls at you, and he modified it himself to shoot balls harder and faster at Andre than any human child could hit it. He wanted other kids to feel easy compared to the ball machine. And then once he modified the ball machine, he forced Andre to hit 2,500 balls a day. And his reason for it was that if you do.

did 2,500 balls a day. That was 17,500 balls per week, which added up to a million balls per year. And he told Andre that if he hit a million balls a year, he would be unbeatable. Andre was seven when he did this. And sure enough, 22 years later, he had eight grand slam titles, an Olympic gold medal, a career golden slam, and was widely considered one of the best tennis players in the world. Now, what's interesting in the book is he talks about. his ascendance and his achievement of all of his goals in a way that is a little bit counterintuitive from the outside, but I think makes sense based on all the science and research we've been talking about in this episode. So, for example, when he became the number one ranked player in the world,

and I think it was 1990, he said that he wasn't happy about it. In fact, he actually just got more anxious and worried because now he had something that he could lose. And when he won his first Grand Slam title. He won Wimbledon in 1992. He also said that he was, wasn't that happy. He was mostly just anxious that he was going to have to defend his title the next year. And so each accomplishment he added to his belt, it didn't make him any happier. It actually made him more miserable because he was afraid of losing what he had already accomplished. This is loss ofversion action. The more you raise the stakes, the more asymmetrical, the downside becomes, right? you have more to lose than you do to gain. So therefore, it becomes a lot more difficult to be

excited and happy to gain more. So this pressure built and built and built and Agassi kind of imploded in the mid-90s. He went through a little bit of a crisis, a career crisis. He started playing terribly. He had drug problems. He had personal life problems. Became kind of a mess. And he had the start over from the bottom. He actually had to kind of go to the equivalent of the tennis minor leagues to like get back on the saddle. And what's interesting is that when he started the second time, he made an agreement with himself, which is that it wasn't going to be about the titles. It wasn't going to be about winning all the matches. It wasn't going to be about being ranked number one. He made tennis a vehicle to some other goal. So he had started a foundation and he realized that the more

he won at tennis, the more he was able to provide resources and attention and donations for his foundation. The foundation actually became the goal. It became the thing that he identified with and the thing that he defined his success and failure by. And interestingly, as soon as tennis became the instrument to that new goal, he quickly ascended again. And he won the French Open in 1999. He became the number one ranked player again. He kind of had this big comeback. in the late 90s and early 2000s. And interestingly, he was able to enjoy it this time. He was able to be satisfied with each victory

because the point of the victory was not the victory. Right? It kind of comes back to what we talked about last chapter about how some definitions of success are self-defeating in that once you achieve them, they go away. If your goal is to be the best player in the world, as soon as you become the best player in the world,

there's nothing else to win. There's only something to lose. and that's incredibly demotivating. Makes you even more anxious and more neurotic and just absolutely miserable. Whereas if you're trying to achieve some other goal and tennis is the instrument to achieve that goal, then being number one in the world is just a better way to achieve that other goal. It's not the point in and of itself. Now, these two approaches, these two periods of Agassiz's career,

I think are good examples of what healthy failure and unhealthy failure end up looking like. An unhealthy version of failure is when you take some arbitrary metric outside of yourself and you decide to base your identity and your self-esteem on it. And that ultimately ends up being self-defeating because you are basing yourself worth on something that you actually don't have control of. Whereas when you take some metric that you do have control of, you know, the quality of your relationships, your contribution to society, your ability to help other people, that is something you do always have control of.

And so the inevitable failures that come along with it, They happen in a way that is much more healthy and able to be integrated into your future actions and behaviors. So it turns out what Agassiz's career shows us is kind of a mapping of what the psychological research shows us, is that there is a healthy way to pursue success and to handle failure, and there is an unhealthy way to pursue success and handle failure. And as we discussed in the last two chapters, It has less to do with work ethic, how hard you're trying, how smart you are, how talented you are,

and it has everything to do with which definitions you've chosen for yourself. Yeah, this really does map, like, really well under the research that was going on for the last 40 years, like even in the middle of when Agassi was going through this, you can categorize goals kind of based on how you define competence of those goals. And these were studies that were done over the 80s and 90s for the most part that came up with this framework, and it continues on to today. But essentially you can have mastery goals where competence of the goal or the mastery of the goal is the reference point is yourself. Right.

Or like it's your own past performance compared to your current performance. Right. Right. You could also conceptualize this as task driven. Right. So the success means just getting better at the thing. Right. Yeah.

Contrast that with performance goals, which are the competence, the reference point for a competence in that is comparison to other people. or some external standard like we've already talked about, right? This is very ego-driven. Success means that you are demonstrating superiority over other people or over some standard that's external to you. So you can already see what we've talked about where this is probably headed, right? Now, one detail about the performance goals is that your ability is judged kind of by your effort to outcome ratio. If you don't try very hard and you succeed, you're like, oh, look, you're really good at that, right?

You're just your performance is really good. You're a good person at that. But if you try really hard and fail, well, that's a, that's a verdict on you and your abilities. You as a person at that point, right? So what's interesting about that is a lot of people, when they have these performance goals or when they conceptualize goals in terms of performance and these external standards or comparing themselves to others, they will withdraw before they even start because they realize that. They're like, oh, if I fail at this, it's a, it's a verdict on me.

So I'm not even going to start. So that's why so many of us do this. We don't even start because that's how we're looking at the goal itself. Right. You talk about this all the time. You've always talked about how competitive you are, but you talk about how you're competitive with yourself. Yeah.

That's what you've tried to do anyways, turn that competition inward, which I think is kind of part of the, part of the unlock here a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you see this a lot in sports psychology. There's all these behind the scenes documentaries and stuff for like NFL players. and NBA players and all this stuff in it. You can see that like all these psychological findings have have absolutely infiltrated

the sports world because all the players say the same shit. They're like it's ultimately it's just it's a competition with ourself, man. Scoreboard doesn't matter. There's all these old sayings that have become really popular like the scoreboard will take care of itself. Do your job. The scoreboard doesn't matter. You know, all these things, I guess kind of heuristics and mechanisms to get the athletes

to turn their yardstick internally and just try to be. as good as they can possibly be and be better than they were the day before and then understanding that if they do that well consistently, they will win games and championships as a side effect. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, every professional sports team has a sports psychologist on staff now and probably collegiate teams at this point too. But yeah, you make an important point there too is that these are, they're situational states. You can change this. Yeah. If you do have this orientation that's more performance driven, you can change it back to more of a mastery. goal orientation.

Could go the other way as well, though, too. It's very situational based. I've even figured this out, too. This guy John Nichols kind of figured this out that if you introduce things like Rakeings, public comparisons, the evaluative pressures will tip towards more of the performance and ego-driven goals that you have, right? Where you think about social media, right? This kind of tips us all over into that performance-driven goals just by nature of being in it,

right? There's kind of some parallels with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation here too, which we don't got to get too deep into. But, you know, kind of the same thing. Like if a kid just likes school and then all of a sudden you want to reward them for getting good grades, like by paying them or rewarding them somehow, it turns it into more of a perform. Yep. Right. And you can go from them just doing it because they enjoy it to them now having to perform. And we see this in like lots of different areas.

But it is situationally dependent, but we can use that to our advantage as well. Just like you're saying, like you can turn that competitiveness back on yourself. And I think the key here, the mechanism that's going on here is that when you pursue performative goals, you're tapping into that sociometer. And as soon as you tap into the sociometer, you're getting your self-esteem involved in a way that you can't really win long term. You end up like agassi, right? It's like the more you win, the more you have to lose, right? If you become king of the mountain, like there's only one way, which is down. So even if you succeed at those performative goals or performance-based goals, you just, the success generates more anxiety for the inevitable failure, which just makes that inevitable failure that much more harrowy than difficult to deal with.

Whereas if you turn it inward and focus on the mastery goals, understanding that the performance will happen as a side effect, if you're only competing against yourself, then you don't have to face that self-judgment to nearly the same degree. you're not getting the sociometer involved as much. I think also what you're kind of getting at a little bit here too is what they developed later in this kind of series of studies as well, which is there's another modifying kind of component to this. So you have the mastery, which is more self-referential. And you have the performance goals, which is other referenced, right? But then you also have like, what's your reference towards success? Is it towards success or is it towards avoiding failure? Okay.

So they call that approach, which is approaching you. approach success, you want to, you want to succeed. Yeah. Versus do you want to avoid failure? There's two different orientations. Okay. So you could have like, it gets nerdy here a little bit. There's like a two by two matrix now.

You can have a mastery goal or a performance goal or you can have an approach or avoidance orientation towards those. Okay. So there's like four different configurations and we can kind of go through these, but don't get too bogged down in the matrix of it. But just the configurations actually do have some real world consequences here. So like the mastery, if you have a mastery goal orientation, and you're approaching success.

That's kind of considered to be the healthiest. So you are self-referenced. You want to improve. You just like doing the thing for doing the thing. And you're competing against yourself, maybe, or at least comparing yourself to a past version of yourself. And you're approaching it as in I want to succeed. So am I getting better?

Right. Is this actually working? Did I learn anything from this? There's that kind of orientation towards it. You can also have a mastery avoidance orientation as well. This is like a, I would say like a lot of like really old professors. You know, they're like, they've gotten to, they've developed all these theories or they've

thought about, you know, all these things for so long and they know all this knowledge, but they don't want to like lose their rank within their field. And so they don't take any risks or anything like that. They're avoiding failure. It's that loss aversion again. Yeah. And then you get into the more performance driven one. So like performance approach, which I think is probably what Agassiz started out as he was

performing. He didn't like tennis. So he was performing based on someone else's standards and comparing himself to other tennis players. But he wanted to succeed. He was very, very competitive. But then once he got to that top position, that changed into performance avoidance. Yeah. Where he was, again, didn't like tennis, was comparing himself to all the other people around him or his father's standards or some external standard.

And he didn't want to lose that spot so bad. Right. So he was just trying to avoid failure at a certain point, which is like the worst place to be. Like, yeah, you're, you're just, you're, you're so focused on some external standard of some kind that you don't even, again, you haven't questioned maybe. And you just don't want to lose whatever as you have around it. It's like you're, you're holding onto something so tightly. You don't want to lose something that you don't even want in the first place. Yeah. The effect of the loss ofversion is that the higher you scale any sort of mountain, the stronger the gravitational pull of the failure avoidance. You see this in business all the time, right? Companies, they get to a certain level and then they just stop taking risks, right? Because it's, yeah. know, the executive leadership are like, well, we don't want to fuck up our bonuses. So like, let's just keep doing the same thing. There's actually a great book written about this called The Innovators Dilemma. Yeah. It's about all the examples throughout history of, um, large companies that actually invented technology like 10, 20 years before they became popular, but they

didn't want to take the risk of investing in that new technology because it could potentially, I mean, the most recent and perfect example is the fact that Google actually invented ChatcheeBT, five years before Open AI did, but they actually kept it concealed and didn't develop it because they were afraid that it would interfere with their Google search. And so that's like, perfect example of failure avoidance, undoing the possible benefits of pursuing mastery over something. At the scale of an institution. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, at the, at the individual level, though, what are the real consequences of the fear of failure, right? And if you think about it, They've kind of studied this a little bit too, but you're not actually afraid of the practical

consequences necessarily. I mean, you might be afraid, yeah, I'm going to lose my job or you know, you'll lose the material aspects of it. Sure. But what it really comes down to is back to that sociometer. You're actually afraid of devaluating your rank, let's say, or your, your estimate of yourself within a group, of having that uncertain future of losing others losing interest in you within in whatever social circle you run, essentially it's the feeling of shame that you're afraid of. Right. That's really what we're afraid of. We're afraid of feeling shame.

Yeah. Because that is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves within this ranking sociometer type thing that we've been talking about, right? And it's interesting, and this kind of ties in with the loss aversion, like the side effect of that fear of shame is that we start exaggerating the second and third. or effects of something. So it's like, blows it way out of proportion. Right. So you start imagining things like,

well, I'm afraid of, you know, not being home enough or whatever. And then you start thinking through, what are the consequences of that failure? It's like, oh, well,

junior's going to become a drug addict and he's going to drop out of school and he's going to end up in jail. And it's like all this catastrophize stuff that is not realistic whatsoever, but it is accurately reflects the emotional intensity of that fear of failure.

This comes back to just a truth about human psychology, which is that we always feel first and then we justify the feeling with a narrative later. Yeah. And so if you have this deep-seated fear of failure and fear of shame because of some failure in your life, the narrative you create around that failure will match proportionally to how afraid you are of it. And this is also why the exercise of, of, we've, in a few episodes, we've talked about the exercise of negative visualization, like the stoic practice of, like, actually writing out the worst case scenario and how you would handle it. Because that exercise is so useful because what you realize when you actually start writing out, like, okay, if I'm not home enough or I don't hang out with junior enough, like, what is realistically going to happen? You start writing it out and you realize like, oh, I'm being completely unrealistic right now. I'm blowing things out of proportion.

Yeah, but we blow it out of proportion because, again, of that evolutionary mismatch we have. losing statuses would be so catastrophic in a small group of tribal people, right? Actually, you should overweight that. But really, yeah, if you sit down and think it out, it's honestly not as bad as it is, right? Rarely, yeah. That said, though, okay, so we talked about this in the shame episode a lot, too. Like, shame kind of has a less unhealthy cousin, right? And that's guilt.

Right. guilt and shame, we talked about this a lot in the shame episode as well, the definitions are very important because of where you place the attribution for the bad feelings, right? Basically, guilt is kind of what we say is when you did about bad thing, right? Shame is when you are something bad. Right. All right. And we usually go straight to the shame, or a lot of people who are more shame prone,

at least, we'll go straight to the shame, again, because of that. that fear, that loss of version of loss of status, that sociometer fear that we have, right? But while guilt doesn't exactly feel very good, we at least can feel like we can do something about it. Yeah. In a lot of these situations, right? Roy Baumeister did a lot of this work in the 90s around guilt. It's a relationship maintenance emotion. You feel guilt about something. It motivates you to go do something about it, right? You go repair that relationship. You go apologize. You go make it right in some way. Shame, on the other hand, is like a withdrawal. It's kind of the opposite. Instead of engaging, you want to withdraw from the group or from any social situation because you're so afraid

of losing face in that situation, right? Yeah. So they have, they both feel shitty, but one of them is actually like more productive. Right. Shame is much more calibrated towards those social consequences, not the actual harm done, whereas guilt is like, oh, I actually did something wrong. I need to fix this, Right. My sense is that these kind of more mastery related goals, the consequence is more likely to be guilt over failure because you're not measuring yourself worth. You're kind of managing to leave the sociometer out of it to a large extent, not completely, but to a large extent. So when you do fail, you just kind of feel bad. And you're just like, ah, man, I fucked it up. I should have, didn't take advantage of my situation. Whereas if it's a performance related goal and you're basing yourself worth. And you're basing yourself on hitting some sort of arbitrary external metric that other people are measuring, that's when you invite shame into the equation. Precisely. And I imagine Agassi, right?

It's early on. First of all, he's raised by a fucking crazy father who basically inculcates him from a very young age that like you're only as valuable as your tennis ability and you're going to be the best in the world. Completely performance driven. Completely performance driven. And then he developed. a personality of a person who's like his feeling about himself is completely proportional

on how he's performing on the court, which is not a healthy version of self-esteem. Of course, everything collapses. He falls apart. And as soon as he loses, you know, the world number one or he loses a few big matches, his whole life comes apart because it's just his self-worth comes apart. Whereas the second version, Agassi 2.0, it's much more mastery driven. And it's much more, there's more guilt associated, right? it's like Agassi version 2, if he loses a big tennis match, he feels bad because that's an

opportunity that he could have leveraged to help his foundation, which is his real goal. That's how he's actually measuring success. So he feels, maybe he feels guilty about that. Maybe he feels like he could have done something better. Maybe he feels like he could learn something from it. Whereas Agassiz version 1.0, it's like, if he loses a big match, it's like, oh, I'm a piece of shit. I'm worthless.

I'm such a loser. I can't believe this happened. Right? and then he goes and does a bunch of drugs. Yeah. Yeah. Who was addicted to meth at one point, wasn't he? Yeah.

That's insane. One of the top tennis players in the world, and he gets addicted to methamphetamine because precisely what we're talking about here. Yeah. Like he was so ashamed of who he'd become, right? And by the way, for everybody listening, we did a full solved episode on shame last year. It's about four hours long.

It's actually one of our, I think it's our most popular episode, interestingly. It might be at this point, yeah. Yeah. I think it's, it is the most. popular solved episode. I believe it is August, September of 2025. So go check that out on the feed. If you want to get the full download on shame. I think there's an interesting relationship between guilt and shame and the concept of achievement. I think with each emotion, achievement serves a very different role, right? With guilt, achievement, I think can be very healthy. It alleviates guilt. Like you said,

guilt is, it's action oriented. It's like, okay, I didn't do the thing. was supposed to do. So let me go fix that. Let me, let me be better next time. Let me learn from this so that I don't feel guilty again. Like guilt is a very practical emotion. It's a very corrective emotion in terms of what we do. And so it's anytime it comes up, there's usually a lesson underneath it that we can implement. Shame is a completely different ballgame. And what's interesting is that I think people try to alleviate shame with achievement, but it backfires because what happens is, is the more you try to perform your way out of shame, the more you just reinforce the shame. If I have a deep-seated shame that I'm a fundamentally broken person and

the only thing that is going to make me okay is if I get more views on YouTube, then pursuing more views on YouTube is not going to make me feel better about myself. It's just going to keep feeling like it's not enough. It's like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. Like it's just the more I pursue it, the more I feel like it's not good enough, the more I feel like I have to pursue it further, which is why I think shame drives a lot of addictive, compulsive sort of behaviors. And so the trick is to find a way to convert the shame into the guilt. And I think a lot of that is a perspective shift, which is that understanding that, first of all, your failures don't make you a bad person. they make you a good person who maybe did the wrong thing or who messed up in some shape or form.

Not to bring Jesus back into it, but there's an old Christian saying of love the sinner, hate the send. I think there's a lot of wisdom to that, right? Like that is kind of the conversion move between the shame and guilt. We did our change episode back in June. And I personally think that's one of the best episodes we've done because what I love about that episode is that we, we really got finally detailed about human personality and what are the aspects about ourselves

that we cannot change and what are the aspects about ourselves that we can and how people tend to get both of those things wrong. Like people tend to think the things that can be changed are the things that can't. And so they feel shame around it. They hate themselves for it. And then they also assume that things that can't really be changed are things that they can. And so they just kind of bang their head against the wall constantly trying to change.

them. I think there's a lot of value. I think people who are struggling with this, you can probably get a lot of value from that episode, first of all, but also understanding that like what aspects of yourself are changeable and that ultimately whatever the bad behaviors you feel awful about, they are likely not an inherent part of your nature or who you are. They are very likely bad adaptations that were misused in a new environment. So what I mean, mean by that is that generally speaking, it's like people's patterns that cause bad behavior or problems in their lives. They are leftover patterns from previous eras in their life where that pattern evolved to actually serve them really well. It's like a childhood habit that helped them get through

their childhood in adolescence, but now as an adult, it's backfiring and screwing up all their relationships. But because they've had that pattern for so long, they think that's an inherent part of who they are when really it's just a pattern of behaviors that they picked up very early in their life and they never learned how to put it down. So the move from shame to guilt, I think, is A, first having some compassion for yourself, understanding that failure is inevitable. Everybody screws up everything at some point. That doesn't necessarily make you a bad person and that a lot of the patterns and behaviors behind that failure aren't necessarily permanently who you are. are just patterns you picked up along the way.

And then B, taking that yardstick, and instead of applying it to yourself being worthy of others, try to just apply it to yourself being worthy of yourself, right? Like, it's learning how to take the sociometer out of the equation and recognizing that you don't necessarily have to try to live up to everybody else's standards and arbitrary metrics, Because they are just as arbitrary as ones that you would come up with for yourself. You said something in the change episode, too, that applies here. And I think sums this up pretty well. And brings Buddhism back in, too.

So we get a little Jesus and Buddha here. Fuck, yeah. You made the point that you're, I think it was a meditation teacher of yours, would say, you're perfect just as you are, but you can always be better. Yes. And I think that's getting at that to where we have those inherent characteristics about ourselves that we can't change. You're perfect just as you are.

Yeah. But you can always be better because we have these adaptations. We have all of these arbitrary things that we've set for ourselves. And so there's the difference between guilt and shame, too. Yeah. You don't have to be ashamed of who you are, but you could also be better. Use guilt in those situations where you have failed yourself or failed others and make it right. And I think what I talked about on that episode, and it really applies here, is that you need both sides of that statement to be a whole.

healthy person, right? If you only believe that you're already perfect as you are, then you're going to turn into a narcissistic twat and be self-absorbed and just really impulsive and do whatever you want. If you only believe that you can always be better, then you're going to be guilt-ridden, shame-ridden, you're going to constantly be beating yourself up over small failures and infractions. It is the marriage of those two perspectives simultaneously that I think creates a healthy individual, understanding that like, you're fine. Like, this is, you're a human and you're just as fucked as all the other humans. Like, we're all struggling and we're all failing at pretty much everything that we're trying to do in various capacities. But that's okay. That is being

human. Yeah. And in trying to be better is the whole part of the game. Yeah. That is the whole game. But doing it with self-compassion, right? That's kind of what I think, what we're dancing around. here is for a long time I was very, I'd hear the word self-compassion, be like, oh, this is going to, uh, touchy-feely. It's touchy-feely. It's you're letting yourself off the hook. You're, you know, this is getting into, oh, it's okay. You know, you don't have to do anything. You're perfect as you are going a little too far that way. But that's actually, that's not, that's not what it is. This is kind of like the middle way, right? This self-compassion that we're talking about, recognizing that you, there are things you could change about yourself. There are things you

could do better. Of course. We all can, though. And that's part of the self-compassion is just that recognized shared humanity, right? But there's also like an underlying like you also don't have to change anything too at the same time. Ultimately, it is about how you feel about your failures. In subtle art, I wrote the reason self-esteem, I think the self-esteem movement kind of failed as a movement is that it tried to improve how people felt about their successes in the best aspects of themselves when really the measure, like proper measurement of mental health is how you, how do you feel about your failures and shortcomings. And I think self-compassion is a much better measurement of that. Implicit in it is that you are failing at all times. So the question is, is what is your relationship

with that failure? Is it, is it that of mastery and guilt? Because you didn't, you know, take advantage of your opportunity or maximize your situation? Or is it that of like self-loathing and shame where you try to shrink from the world and hide from the world, because you feel fundamentally inadequate. It is that balance of recognizing and owning the failures, but also being okay with them. That is the way forward. A great book on this.

Like the person who wrote the book on it, Kristen Neff wrote the book called Self-Compassion about this, right? And she goes into like what all this entails and everything. One of the things she talks about it in a lot is she cheated on her ex-husband, I think it was, and had a lot of shame around that for a very long time. It just felt like she was a bad person. eventually came around and said, no, no, no, I just, I ended up doing this bad thing.

Right. And, and kind of converting that into guilt and being like, I can do better in the future. I'm okay. It's all right. Eventually got there, right? She talks about how self-criticism really kind of escalates that shame more, whereas the self-compassion, what you do want to cultivate is kind of what you use to convert that into some form of actionable guilt, I guess. Both of them feel shitty. Again, neither of them feel good, right?

but just one of them has an out. One of them has a direction you can point yourself. And she kind of talks about these three components that you can kind of cultivate for more self-compassion, one of them being self-kindness rather than the self-criticism, right? Another one I mentioned already was a common humanity. Like recognizing like we've just been talking about, we're all kind of fucked up. We all have these major shortcomings. Yeah. Original sin if you want to or life is suffering from the Buddhists, right?

Like we all have that. Recognizing that helps be a little bit kinder to yourself too. Yeah. And I think that's kind of a natural outcrop of shame is that one of the defining aspects of shame is that you feel like I'm the only one who's like this. Yes. Right. Everyone else is normal. Yeah.

I'm fucked up. Which the reality is that we're all fucked up. It's a little bit narcissistic even too. It is. It is. It really is. Yeah. And it is interesting that, yeah, both.

So both religions have kind of a counterpoint to that. It's like a fundamental basis, right? The Buddhists believe that it's like, yeah, everybody suffers all the time, which implies your suffering is not special at all. Right. Christianity says we are inherently of sin. We're flawed, essentially. We are always off target, which is basically saying that it's not giving you permission to fail.

It's just saying that it's inevitable. Right. So there's nothing uniquely wrong with you because we're all in the same boat. Right. Kind of touches on her third component of it too, which was mindfulness over over identification with whatever you did. Like the shame basically saying, I am this bad, horrible, terrible person. That's over identifying with it. Yeah.

There's a better way to do it, which is to be mindful of that. You're like, oh, no, no, no, no. I'm actually separate from this bad thing that I did in some way, shape, or form. I don't have to over-identify. with that, right? And she says you could do it best through mindfulness, which, I mean, sure, I would agree too. You talked about my meditation practice lately. This is a big thing around it is not identifying with your thoughts, with your emotions, with your failures, with whatever is going on, with any sort of identity that you have. Being able to say like, oh, that is, that's not real.

In a sense, it's not real. Yeah. Right? We go back to that relative versus ultimate thing I talking about. Yes, relatively speaking, you might have let someone down. You might have screwed up. You might have failed somehow. But ultimately, that's not actually who you are. Yeah, a really common meditation practice that I've seen taught in many places is that as you're meditating and as identifying thoughts arise, reframe them in your own head. So, for example, if you say, like, I am tired, you reframe it in your head as I'm, I am experiencing tiredness. Right. Or if you have something like, I, I'm, I don't know, you're thinking about something that happened. you're like, I'm a bad friend.

You're like, I'm somebody who behaved badly with a friend, right? Like, it's just you keep removing the I-amness of it and you replace it with like, this happened. And it creates that separation there. So you're like, oh, okay, this is just something that's feeling. Thoughts, feelings, all of that, they're temporary. Again, the impermanence of everything comes back to that as well, right? Yeah. Another really good meditation practice, though, is what they call meta or loving kindness.

And it's really interesting because, is the way they do it is they'll start you out with, you know, think of someone very close to you that you love and adore and just have no ill will towards, you know, send them love and kindness. And this is getting touchy-feely really quick. I know. Look at you, Drew. But the point of doing that is then you think of like somebody like an acquaintance. Yeah. Okay. Now wish them, you know, happiness and all of that.

Okay. Now think of somebody that's maybe a little bit difficult to get along with. Find a way to then wish them back. Eventually, you back to yourself, though, which is for a lot of us, that's the hardest one. Right. But after practicing it on other people, just like if a friend comes to you, right? And they're like, I'm feeling shameful about something I did or whatever. And you're like, no, it's okay.

And you walk them through. You're not a bad person. It's a, you know, you did a bad thing. But that's okay. You can make this right. You can point that back at yourself and eventually get to that self-compassionate place where you are separate from a lot of those things, where you can see this as, oh, this is something I can move on from something I can change, something I can convert to guilt if I need to.

All right. It's, I know. Cumbaya Bernie. No, no, no, no. You know what? Honestly, the waking up app from Sam Harris, and we got to deal with them. And I was a paid member before we even had a partnership with them. We both were.

Yeah, we both were. Friend of the show. Friend of the show. It's a fantastic app. And it's not, there's no of the mysticism and religion. If you're not into that, there's a really great introductory course that he does. and it will walk you through how to meditate just what we're talking about

this mindfulness and separating from your thoughts and motions and all that. It teaches some meta even too in the introductory course. This has been just indispensable, invaluable for me over these last year or two, honestly, that I've been getting more into this. And it really does, like when you do separate from those thoughts and emotions in a way

and you see them for what they really are, like it just takes so much of the sting off of it. And so like, I'm not enlightened. I'm not going to say that by any means, but I would say I've reduced my suffering by quite a bit just from that. So you can go to Manson.d. Deal slash waking up and you can get a free trial for that and yeah, get started on that. Like I said, the introductory course is fantastic just to start with. He really knocked it out of the part with that. Yeah. Yeah. But then there's all sorts of read. There's talks on there about meditation. There's way more meditations around it. There's lots of meta meditations if you want to

get into that. Like it's worth it. All right. Join Drew Bernie on his path to enlightenment. That's right. All right. So we've, we've established how failure is arbitrary, relative, purely definitional. We've now talked about how there's kind of two ways we respond to failure. There's like the shame-based response. There's the guilt-based response. Obviously, we want to try to convert our failure responses more to guilt because that's what opens up the opportunity for improvement and growth and change. So in the next chapter, we're going to finally get into the nuts and bolts of like, how do you actually grow from failure? How do you learn from failure? How do you change from your failures? Turns out

there's three different types of failures. Each way that you learn from them is slightly different. We're going to get into all of that. And we are officially done with all the Jesus and Buddha kumbaya bullshit. So stick her out. But before we keep going, let's take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by purpose. We've been talking about failure this entire episode, and I want to talk about what most people actually do when they fail at something. They open a chat bot, type out the whole thing at midnight,

and it says some version of, that sounds really tough. You're being so brave by reflecting on this. And then they feel better for about an hour. Nothing changes. Because the tool was built to make them feel good, not to help them figure out what went wrong. Purpose is the first AI that is built to do the opposite.

It learns your personality, your values, and the patterns you keep repeating, especially the ones that keep landing you in the same place. And when you fail at something, it doesn't tell you that you're handling it beautifully or that you're so brave. It asks what part was actually in your control, what you should do differently,

and then gives you the next step. Not a 10-item plan that you'll forget by Thursday, one simple thing. And then it checks in later. If anything in this episode hit close to home and you want something that helps you actually learn from your mistakes instead of just processing your feelings about it forever, go to mark.

dot deals slash purpose and start for free. That's mark.d deals slash purpose. This episode is brought to you by waking up. So we've spent this whole episode talking about failure. And honestly, the failure itself is usually over pretty fast. What lasts is your mind replaying it on a loop for the next six months. The conversation you should have handled differently. The problem you saw coming and avoided it anyway. Your brain will construct an entire courtroom, put you on trial, and find you guilty every single night at 2 a.m. Drew and I both use waking up and we're using it long before it sponsored the show. It's the meditation app built by Sam Harris and it's the only one either of us has stuck with because it's the only one that treats you like an adult. There's no soothing voices telling

you to picture your problems as a leaf on a stream. It actually teaches you how your mind works. It gives you guided meditations, lessons on consciousness, philosophy, conversations with people who have spent their entire lives studying this stuff. There is no fluff. And if you want to keep losing the 2 a.m. trial, that's your call. Or you could learn how the courtroom got built in the first place. Waking up is giving solved listeners a free 14-day trial. So go to solved.deals slash waking up to get started. That's solved.d.deals slash waking up. In the mid-1990s, there was a first year PhD student at Harvard named Amy Edmondson. And she was studying medication errors that happened in hospitals and among medical teams. And she was working with some very prestigious

people in the field. Her thesis posited a pretty reasonable hypothesis, which is that the teams that had the best teamwork and communication probably committed the fewest errors and had the best outcomes in patients in the hospital. And so she spent tons of time studying this. She spent hundreds of hours in the hospitals. She studied eight different nursing units and worked in two different hospitals over this period. And then the data came back completely wrong. In fact, it came back backwards. It was the medical teams that had the most errors were the highest performing. Now, this freaked her out. She wrestled with a great deal of shame. She started to think, maybe I don't know what I'm doing. Maybe I don't know how to do research. Maybe I screwed up

the data. What am I doing here? I'm a fraud. I'm a fake. Everything is wrong. Fortunately, she stuck with it. She went back to the data. She spent some more time analyzing it. And then she came to a profound realization, a realization that is kind of like a sister realization of the survivorship bias we talked about in chapter one. And that is that it wasn't that the best medical teams committed more errors. It's that they felt free to report more errors. It's the teams that were screwing up the most. They were the ones that weren't even surfacing the mistakes that they were making. They weren't even aware of the mistakes they were making in the first place, whereas the best teams had the most awareness over their mistakes, and so they were reporting them more often.

So what she realized is kind of this paradoxical effect, which is that the people who tend to learn the most from failure are the ones who confront the most failures. And the people who learn the least are the ones who find ways of avoiding or just simply being oblivious of their failures in the first place. Now, she would go on and develop the concept of psychological safety and teams. This has been shown in a bunch of research to actually be one of, if not the most important trait of successful teams is that people feel a psychological safety to fail to make mistakes, to correct each other or to point out errors in each other's work. That's not the thing that you would intuitively guess or point at if you were to guess what makes for the best performing team. You would probably assume the same thing she assumed, that they

have great communication, that they collaborate super well, they have the best ideas. When at the end of the day, it's like, no, actually, they are the most honest about their failures, not only to themselves, but to each other. And I think the psychological safety piece of it is crucial because, because as we've talked about throughout this episode, our failures hurt so much because of the social repercussions that they have. But if we are surrounded by people who are accepting of those errors, that gives us the permission to openly face them. Edmondson, she actually, later on in her career in the, in 2023, she wrote a book called The Right Kind of Wrong. And it was the Financial Times business book of the year, actually, and basically recaps her entire career around studying

this type of thing and studying failure in teams, but also within individuals, too, like creating psychological safety within yourself, as could be our argued to be a very important thing to admitting your mistakes, being honest about them, all of that sort of thing, right? She identified three different kinds of failures, three different kinds of errors that can occur. And each one of them kind of demands a different response. Even though we kind of treat failures kind of all the same, you need to learn the same lesson

from all of them. She said, no, that's actually not the case. There's different kinds of failures. And some we can learn from and some we can't really learn a whole lot from. So we should just move on from them, right? The three types of failures, there was basic failures, complex failures. and then intelligent failures. Okay.

So a basic failure is basically just, it's familiar territory. You've done this thing a million times. Just something. You just did it wrong. The ball got dropped somewhere, somewhere along the way, right? In a hospital setting and even in individual settings, though, she's like, usually what the fix is is like a checklist. Like, just make a checklist if you drop the ball here.

Set up some sort of system, set up some sort of forcing function that it just forces you to make sure you do this every time. there's no real lesson to be learned here from these types of failures, right? Just fix it, move on, just don't do it again. That's the lesson, basically, from those, right? Then there's what she called complex failures. There's usually kind of multiple causes or sources. Maybe there's multiple people involved or multiple steps in a process that you just,

you forgot to order something or a delivery got delayed or whatever it is, right? In an institutional setting, it's usually just there's a lot of moving parts. Moving parts, lots of people. And usually what it is, it's a reflection of the system that you have built for. it, right? You need to have a system in place to make sure it doesn't happen again, some sort of robust system or a more robust system. Yeah, or like a system that like flags issues before they happen. It surfaces issues before they happen. Yeah, something like that. Okay. You could even say in this too, like on the individual level, there's a parallel here with like any kind of relationship,

right? Maybe it's a romantic relationship or something where there's so many moving parts of that. There's different communication styles. There's maybe different goals that are even going on. but you would maybe have some system in place for that relationship, you know, to get too technical and nerdy about it. But, you know, like successful couples usually have regular check-ins. You know, that's a system. Or like certain communicative habits, right?

Okay, yeah. People never break up for one reason or they rarely break up for one reason. Even if somebody cheats or something, it's usually the cheating is not, didn't happen in a vacuum. There's like a whole history of things that led up to the cheating. Yeah. I know people who have gone so far as to actually formally introduce systems

into their relationships with like different like to i know a guy who has a fucking notion for his marriage you told me about this before i that's okay and they have like monthly goals quarterly goals it's uh i'm all about regular check-ins don't even wrong yeah it's a lot yeah whatever works that's true whatever floats your boat they seem very happy so okay it is interesting to see relationships as like a complex system whereas like a basic failure is oh i forgot to take out the trash because I was tired, you know, whatever. There can be some learning done in a complex failure, but generally it's just like more about prevention, right?

Like preventing things from getting worse than they were or repeating the mistake again. Improving the system. Exactly. Yeah. The last type was intelligent failures, though. And these are more like, she treats these more like experiments, okay? This is where you're actively trying to learn something, whether it fails or not. And failure is almost kind of besides the point at this point, right?

There's a few criteria, she points out that, that create an intelligent failure. One of them is new territory, something you've probably never done before, but you're trying it out. So you set out to learn something absolutely new. So again, failure is kind of beside the point at this, at this stage. You are actually setting out to gain something that, at some future time, at least, to have some sort of gain, some sort of credible opportunity that you're looking to capitalize on. Okay, you're not just doing this on a whim. It's intentional. You also have a prediction about how this is going to go. All right. It's not like, you have a guess of like, if I do, this, then this will happen. The intelligent part, I think, is really in this last component that she describes, which is keeping it as small as possible. Because it's unknown territory, because there's all this uncertainty around it, you keep the stakes kind of small in order to learn something very specific. You try to blow this out of proportion and you don't actually learn a whole lot because you don't actually know what went right and what were wrong or if it was just luck. Again, she treats these more as experiments, and this is really what she says, this is the repeatable thing we want to do. This is

the kind of failure we actually want to actively engage in. Whereas the other two, like, basic failures, mitigate those as much as possible. You're not going to learn a whole lot anyway. Minimize them, move on. Complex failures, kind of the same thing. Optimize your systems, have good systems in place. They're complex, so you have to. But otherwise, it's more about prevention in that. Intelligent failures are where we really can potentially learn the most. Yeah. It's interesting. Tim Ferriss has a heuristic around decision making that is kind of similar to this, where he says that when choosing what to try to do, ask yourself which failure produces the most information, which is really interesting if you think about it. And I've ended up running these through a lot of my own decisions where I'm like, okay, I'm going to try to do this thing.

It has like maybe a 10% chance of success. But by failing at it, I'm going to learn so much about myself, about the team, about my abilities, about what I like, what I don't like, that it's probably still worth. doing anyway. Okay, so just to recap real quick, so the basic failures don't require a whole a lot of response. The complex failures, get your systems in place, surface the problems as quickly as possible, increase the number of intelligent failures, just like you were talking about. You're, you're good at you do this all the time. Yeah, yeah. You do it's in the business all the time. You're just like, we're going to try this. And then two weeks later, you're like, it's not working. Didn't work. Let's work. But we learned that it didn't work. Right. This thing doesn't work. This thing doesn't

work. Oh, this thing kind of works. Let's go with that. Right. And it is, it's usually small little things that we're pushing the envelope. I do want to go back and double-click really quickly on the basic failures. You said they don't, there is no response. What's implied in that is don't dwell on it. Yeah, okay. Like a lot of people will sit and dwell and they'll be like, oh my God, I'm such an idiot. Why did I do that thing?

I can't believe I. Or they searched for the lesson. And the lesson is you just. You were tired. You were tired. Yeah. He just dropped the ball this one time. There's not a big lesson to be a clean firm.

So just move on. Yeah. Okay. So that makes a lot of sense. And it's good to know what kind of failure. we're dealing with when it happens. What about this idea that failure makes us more resilient, that it makes us stronger? I'll punch you to one study that was done in 2010.

And what they found was that previously successful founders, okay, they'd had a business, they succeeded with it, probably sold it, had some sort of exit, went on to found a new company. Their second venture succeeds about 30% of the time. A little bit surprising, but it's only about a third of the time, right? But if you look at first-time founders who've never started a company before, they succeed about 21. 1% of the time. Now, these are, again, these are venture back. So they're pretty, they're vetted selected for. These are the best of the best. The best, right? If you have started a business before and failed that business, then try to start another one, what they found in this study anyway

was you would succeed about 22% of the time. So there's really not a whole lot of difference between a first time founder and somebody who's failed once and tried to start again. They're basically the same, have about the same hit rate in venture back capital anyway. Interesting. That kind of tells us in that situation anyway that they didn't learn a whole lot from their failures, right? Like they're gleaning more from their successes there. The successful people are gleaning more from their successes than the failures are from their failures, right? The success seems to transfer more than the failure does in that situation. I'm not saying obviously there are people who like learn a lot from failures and the intelligent failures are the best ones and all of that, right?

I'm not so sure how to completely generalize that, but it is an interesting little fact there. and especially in the entrepreneurial and venture-backed world where Billiour is celebrated so much. Right. Worshipped. It doesn't seem like there's actually that much of an effect. In business, there are almost an infinite number of ways to fail. In most markets, there are only a handful of ways to succeed.

So it actually makes sense that you would learn more from your successes than your failures because it's like each individual failure. You only found one way to fail. Right. There's just, there's thousands of ways you can fuck up. Whereas there's really only a handful of ways that you can succeed. I'm trying to think if that generalizes to other things. I'm not sure, but there is one little thing they found in this too

that kind of goes along with that, which is one of the skills that seem to be repeatable, which kind of goes against everything I've ever heard to, it was market timing. Oh, yeah. So if you know that market really well, like you said, you've succeeded in at once, you can time it again for whatever shift in that market there is.

Like that's a transferable skill. Yeah, you could say market knowledge. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, yeah, it's down, that's downstream market knowledge. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

I think one of the reasons purpose has been so successful in our space is that, you know, I've been doing this for 20 years. Like I know this market, this industry like the back of my hand. It's been interesting. All of our competitors come from other markets. And so I see them making what are in my opinion like pretty large missteps. I think it's likely we're either close to being the market leader or currently the market leader. Yet we were started comparatively on a shoestring budget.

Like some of these companies raised tens of millions of dollars. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. But I think it speaks to the fact, too. What it is is market knowledge. I'm trying to think of that if that applies the relationships as well. Everybody says like the divorce rates 50%, which, by the way, has not been true in 30, 40 years.

It's more like 30, 32%. But what's interesting is most of the divorce rates. of the divorces come from the same small group of people. If you've been divorced once, you're actually way more likely to be divorced in future marriages. So it also makes me wonder if... That's an interesting parallel. You just found another way to fail a relationship. You never found the right way to do it. Exactly. There's one way to do it. And there's like that classic Tolstoy quote. Every happy family is the same. Every miserable family is miserable in its own way. Meaning there's lots of ways to be miserable. There's a lot of ways to fail a relationship. There's a very narrow path. There's really just only a couple

ways to have a successful one. Yeah, and if you figure that out early, it's easier to repeat, I think, is the point from that. So, yeah, it's just that does failure make you stronger? That question is like asking, do dumbbells make you stronger? It's like, well, it kind of depends on how you use them, right? Right. Not only that, there's actually a really interesting kind of parallel with, like, working out with this. It's this concept of hormesis, okay? And hormesis is when a stressor is it's harmful at very high doses, but it's very ineffectual at very, very low doses, kind of an inverted U curve to it. That's kind of what we see with failure is the same thing as working out, right?

You lift just a right amount of weight at the right time and a right dosage. You get stronger. If you overdo it or underdo it, you don't learn anything from it. And they've identified these like four moderators that determine whether or not you will learn from adverse events or failure in your life, too, okay? The first one is dosage, like I said, like how much are you actually exposed to the failure? Again, if it's too much, you get overwhelmed. You're overwhelmed and you just give up, right?

If you don't get enough, you're not pushed in the right direction, right? It's coming back to that balance that you need to have some sort of motivation, but not too much so that you quit. Right. There was this one research in the late 2010s as Wilson found what they called the 85% rule. The optimum error rate is about 15%. So you're succeeding about 85% of the time, but failing about 15% of the time. Again, if you're just succeeding all the time, you're not getting a whole lot of error signal and correction signal. If you're failing all the time, you're probably just going to

give up. So, but it was just interesting to find that there's actually like a number they can put on it. About 15% failure rate you learn the most. You also, just like when you're lifting weights of two, you need recovery. That's the second moderator. This is something I learned recently. My knee is, I've been trail running and went way too hard and went to the PT and he's like, well, how much you rest in? And I told him and he's like, that is no, dude. He's like, no, no. And I was running way too, way too frequently, way too much. Yeah. Same thing with failure. After a failure, you need a point to recover and process that. If it's an intelligent failure, you need time to be able to process that. Another one is whether or not this failure was survivable to your identity. How big of an hit did you

take to your identity. Going back to what we talked about in that chapter on over identifying with your goals or even making some part of your life of your entire identity, if you take a hit to that, like how much does it actually drain? How much of a hit do you actually take to who you are? Yeah, the defense mechanisms will kick in and you'll ignore the data in front of you to preserve your ego. The ego is a hell of a drug, right? It will come in and it will try to defend itself and try to survive over learning anything. And then the last moderator is very intertwined with this intelligent failure type of thing,

which is extraction. Like, do you actually sit down and learn from it? If you're too ego-driven around it, if you're too performance-driven around it, you don't sit down and learn the lessons. You just try to save face. You just try to make yourself look good from the failure or whatever it is.

You're not going to learn a whole lot. That goes back to the whole psychological safety thing that Edmondson found. She found it in institutions, but like I was arguing, I think you have to have it with yourself as well, too. Like, is it okay for you to sit down and be honest with yourself about this failure that you had? You do have to take the time to actually extract the lessons from it. You have to be able to surface those and be self-aware enough to surface the lessons from the failure to learn something from it.

So that's really useful. Dosage, recovery, survivability, extraction. There are a few techniques we can apply as well that help mitigate failure and also help prep us beforehand to make sure that we learn from it. one of them is the premortem, which is a practice where you sit down before you start working on a new goal or new project or you take the team before you start on like this quarter's initiative or whatever. And you actually take like an hour and you write out if this is to fail, what will have caused it? And you come up with as many ideas as possible of what those potential failure points are. And you write them out. And you think of the catastrophic failures, the mild failures, the systemic failures, the complex failures.

And then, of course, the basic failures. Like, where are the places that you can just potentially screw up? And then once you've mapped out all of the potential failure points, that can allow you to start planning to prevent those from happening in the first place. So it can reinforce your plans going into whatever project you're doing to make sure that the failures don't happen ahead of time. The other thing that you can do, so there's some research pretty recently in 2022 around looking at how people are able to properly extract the lessons from failures after the fact. One is called loss framing, which is take whatever you lost from the failure and actually

quantify it. Like try to list out all the things that it cost you. This could be how much money you lost, how many hours you spent, how many clients you missed out on, how much revenue was lost out on. there's something about quantifying things, and it's interesting because this works in reverse as well. Like when you quantify things in your life, you kind of objectify it and it allows you to kind of separate yourself from it a little bit. That's a little bit of a hazard when you do that to the good things in your life. But if you're evaluating the bad things in your life, you can actually use that to your advantage, right?

So if you're super upset that something didn't go your way, if you actually sit down with a spreadsheet and calculate, okay, what did I actually miss out on here? oh, it was like 500 bucks in like 12 hours of my life. You're like, okay, that's not that bad, actually. Like, I think I'm going to be fine. The nice thing, too, is that by quantifying that failure, it gives you a better sense of how to move forward or how to correct it moving into the future. And again, like we talked about earlier, like what often happens is that something feels catastrophic.

And then when you actually write it out, you're like, oh, okay, that actually isn't that bad. Like I'm being a little bit of a drama queen right now. The second technique that these researchers identified is something called corrective feedback, which is really just simple, like, what are the tangible steps and processes you can do the next time that will prevent that failure from happening again? So it's essentially the postmortem rather than the premortem. It's like, okay, this is what happened.

If we did these things in hindsight, it would have prevented it. So let's make sure that those things are implemented going into the future. But ultimately, to bring this all back to the definitional problem of failure in the first place is that our ability to manage the failure is largely going to be dependent on how we define our expectations in the first place. And so the four moderators that you mentioned are a huge part of that is like simply setting our expectations appropriately so that we are pursuing something that is the manageable challenge. It is something that is both achievable but also difficult, something that we can recover from, something that is not thought. threatening to our ego identity and something that we can definitely learn and extract information from after the fact. If you line up your goals to match those factors after the fact, then you were setting yourself up for good failures. As we've established, those failures are

inevitable. So we might as well line ourselves up to have the failures that we're going to benefit the most from. You've kind of mentioned this a few times on various episodes that we've done about some of your relationships, I guess. I think there's, like a kind of a crude pre-mortem, post-mortem thing you did, you did when you got with your now wife, you were like, okay, I'm not going to, if this ends, it's not going to be because of all these dumb reasons from before. Yes. So there's a little bit of a post-mortem, pre-mortem thing going on there. That's a really good catch. I had not, I had not thought about that. We're talking about businesses and money and all this stuff, but it applies on a lot of other areas,

too. Yeah, I screwed up so many of my early relationships for very stupid reasons. And the only agreement I made with myself when I was dating my wife was just, if this ends, make sure it's not for a dumb reason. That was it. Yeah, like I said, like it's a crude premortem kind of type of thing, but also there's a postmortem kind of looking back analysis that you did as well. You're like, oh, I messed up this, this and this. This relationship failed because of whatever trait that I have that I don't want to have going forward, right? And you turn that into also a premortem as well. But this brings up an important facet of this, of failure, which is when is it okay to quit? Ah, okay.

Like, when is quitting failure and when is quitting actually just being smart and not banging your head against the wall? There's been some interesting research around this too. There was this, uh, Carston Rorsch. Um, I believe this is back in the early 2000s. Identified these like, okay, there's, there's two capacities that we have when we're looking at quitting. There's gold disengagement. So that's quitting, basically. Like, when do you disengage?

Like, there's a skill around when to quit, right? But there also has to be a skill of reengaging. And does that reengaging with the same goal or a different goal, there's like a whole skill set around that, too. They're kind of, they're two independent skills as well, all right? One doesn't necessarily follow the other and vice versa, right? People who can do these both very well, they know when to quit and they know where and when to re-engage.

They seem to have the best outcomes around mental health, well-being, happiness, all of that. Again, they're independent, though. Just because you have one doesn't mean you have the other necessarily. What they've also found, too, is that that's why this whole like never give up kind of ethos that's out there in the culture is actually terrible advice. Because actually the best advice is, yeah, give up smartly and then reengage smartly too. Like, know when to pivot or whatever you want to call it. That's actually the best way to do that. But like, how do you go about doing this is the whole question. How do you define smartly? Exactly. Any Duke, who is. had on the luck episode last time. She has a whole book on quitting. And it's fantastic, actually.

Everybody should go out and read that one. She gets very in the weeds about certain things, but then she talks about relationships. She talks about career. She talks about all different areas of life. Okay. She says something along the lines of quitting on time is usually too late. Right? It feels too early, but usually you're actually too late. Interesting. There was some studies she talked about, one in particular where people were going through big life changes and having to make decisions about something and it involved quitting, changing a career, leaving a relationship, those sorts of things like big life decisions, right? They found these people while they were still deliberating on this, whether or not,

followed up with them like six to 12 months later or something like that. The people who quit pretty much right away were much happier six to 12 months later than the people who hung on for longer. A lot of times what they would do too is like what's the, what's the, what's the, the chances of this working out versus not working out. If you're at 50-50, you're usually actually at more like 75-25, like you should quit at that point. We hang on for a little bit too long. Again, it goes back to that loss aversion thing. That's what she found in that book, though, which I thought was just a fascinating thing. It's like, when you're like, ah, yeah, I don't know,

maybe I should quit, maybe I shouldn't. It's a toss-up. Most likely you should probably just go ahead and quit at that point. And I've seen this, a lot of my therapist friends, like, work with people who are, you know, they're really unsatisfied in their jobs. And they're like, man, if this person would just quit their job. And I've told them, I'm like, oh, you should get that book for them. And I'm like, that's a little too on the nose given a book called quit, you know, and telling them what to do. But I think there's something to that where intelligent quitting feels like quitting too early a lot

of times. We probably should quit a lot more than we do. Right. But it goes back to that loss aversion that we hold on to, that bias that we hold on to. It's interesting that the conventional wisdom is always to stick to it. Yeah, stick it out. Whereas it sounds like the actual research suggests that people should. should quit more often. Yeah. Yeah. Relationships too. A lot of people are like,

ah, they've been going through this. Like, should I stay? Should I go? If you're at that point, most of the time, it's probably time to go. There's sunk cost fallacy, right? You know, people, especially you get five years into a job or eight years into a relationship and it feels like you're throwing away all that time if you don't stick it out. So there's a lot of biases against quitting. What are the questions or like the, the ways we can determine whether it's time to quit something or not. So Rorsch actually had these like five questions you should ask on whether or not you should quit, right? The first one being attainability, like honest appraisal, like, is this actually something you have the time, the resources, and the willingness to like stick out? If not, move on,

right? That's a pretty simple one. Simple, not easy. Because it's a lot of people, I mean, I do this too. A lot of people are not honest with themselves. How much time and energy they're going to put into something. Like there are many things that if I spent 12 hours a day every single day, I probably could accomplish. But am I? No. I was just talking to a friend recently and she's like, you know what? I really want a clean house. But I just know I'm not going to do it. I know I'm lazy.

So I'm not going to do it. Yeah. I was like, okay, good on you. Yeah. All right. The next one, the reversal test. Okay. So imagine succeeding fully right now.

Again, being very honest with yourself, would you still want it? Or is it more just like this kind of? nebulous idea that you have that you might want it. It separates this kind of from like, is this goal the wrong goal or is it the setback that's going to hurt more? If you fully succeeded in it, would you actually still want it? That's a hard one to imagine as well. You mean still want it after succeeding? Yes. Yeah. Like still want to do it. Yes. Would you want to continue doing it? Which like, for example, Agassi, if you would ask him, if you were the best player in the world, would you still want to play Tennessee? He would immediately say no. At one point he would

they know. Right. Then we go back to the approach versus avoidance thing as well, too. So are you moving to something better or are you just trying to avoid failure? Like if you set a goal out, or are you just trying to fulfill some external goal where you're not going to be seen as a failure? Or are you actually trying to learn something and get better? Again, turning that back on yourself and competing with yourself and improving yourself versus just trying to avoid failure. The advisor test, I kind of like this one, too. It's like, would you tell a friend to go after this? Like, if a friend came to you and said, gave you all the information that you have in front of you said, I want to do this. This is how much time, money, resources, energy I'm going to put into it. Would you tell that same friend to do it or not?

That's, I think, another tricky one, too. It's a tough one. It requires a lot of honesty. The last one, the cost of the information. So is continuing still the cheapest way to learn something in this, in this situation? Or do you already have the lesson? Are you actually going to learn something out of this and get something out of this? Or do you already know this lesson? And is just kind of like a waste of your time. The through line through all of this, really, though, is that rational quitting. It's kind of a directional thing.

Rational quitting is, its approach motivated. So you're trying to succeed. You're trying to figure out something. You're trying to learn something. It's honest and it's attainability. You could actually probably do this, or you're willing to do it anyway. And you're going somewhere with it.

That has direction. Again, you're learning. You're pushing something into new territory and learning something new. about yourself. Fear quitting on the other side. It's avoidance motivated. You're just trying to avoid failure. You're trying to avoid discomfort. And really the only, maybe the only successful route to it is exiting it, is failing it, um, to begin with. So that would, those were Rorsch's kind of five criteria anyway. I have another one that I used to ask people way back in the day when I,

when I, when I coach people, which is I, I used to call it the desert island test, which is if you could do it, but you had to do it on a desert island and nobody would know about it. Would you still do it? And I like that one because it sorts out the people who are externally motivated. They're like really chasing that social validation, that social approval. Because in a lot of cases, people are like, no, actually I wouldn't. Which then tells you something. You're not actually doing it for the thing itself. I think the other interesting question around this that I've heard recently, so there was an interview of Elon Musk a few years ago, and they were talking about, I mean, the story of SpaceX is just like absolutely ridiculous. He was so close to bankruptcy multiple times. And it

was interesting because the interviewer asked him, he said, looking back, what do you think, if you were to run the SpaceX experiment a hundred times, how many times would it have succeeded? And I forget what he said, but it was a very low number. It was like, you know, he was like maybe three or four times out of 100. It would actually have worked. And then the interviewer said, at the time, what did you think the likelihood was that SpaceX was going to succeed? And he said 10%, which was a little bit shocking, because most entrepreneurs are like delusionally optimistic about themselves. And then the interviewer said, well, if you only thought it had a 10% chance to succeed, why did you still do it? And he said something really fascinating is he said some things are

worth doing even if you expect them to fail, which I never really thought about before. That's a very different way to look at things. Yes. Right? Like what in your life is worth doing even if it is overwhelmingly likely that it's going to fail? It's hard to think of that's hard to come up with something. Yeah. More than like one or two things.

Yeah. In terms of like a litmus test of what you're willing to fail at and what failures are tolerable and what failures are worth it and what failures you can learn from. I think that's a pretty powerful question. And again, to bring back the Agassi example, right, like Agassi 1.0, if you asked them, if you knew you were going to fail at your tennis career, would you still do it? Is it still worth doing? Chances are, I'm pretty sure he would have said absolutely not.

There's no way I would do this if I thought I was going to fail. Whereas Agassi 2.0, if you asked him, he probably would have still done it, right? Because he's like, look, this is my best route to do the thing. I really care about contribute to the thing that really matters to me. The tennis is just, it's a side effect of what I actually care about. Yeah. Which is really interesting. That is very interesting. Do you have anything like that in your life that you can think of? I think it can also be applied backwards too, I guess. So like you can look back and say, well, that was still worth it even though I failed. That's a little more common, I think. The thing that comes to mind immediately is my marriage.

Yeah. That is a hurdle you kind of have to cross to get into a marriage because it is like when you get married, like it is something that you think about. It's like, is, are we going to go to the distance? Is this going to end in divorce? Like, even this business, if I, if I knew it was going to fail, I would probably still do it. I would do it much differently. Ah, right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, yeah. I would do it differently. It's more common for us to apply this backwards, I think, where it's like, oh, it failed, but I think it was still worth it. That's a little easier to see sometimes, too. I don't want to get too far into it. But yeah, yeah, I am newly single. And, and so I had relationship that failed. Yet another one in my life, too. It's a long string of them that I have not

learned a lot from, I think. Sometimes I, not like you were having. I'm sure you have. I've learned plenty. I've learned plenty. But you know, going through this breakup, leading up to it was just, it was a lot of emotional turmoil going on. And the breakup itself, like when it, we dragged it out over a couple hours and all this, right? But I did say at one point, there are people who don't get the chance to have their heart broken like this. And that's what I mean. Like, that was worth it. Like, this sucks.

Terribly sucks, right? But some people don't even get the chance to feel this shitty. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, that's a weird way to put it, I guess. And it's a, again, it's a backwards looking kind of a version of this. But yeah, I'm looking back and I'm like, that was worth it. I did learn a lot from this.

And I'm still taking a lot of lessons from it. But it kind of took that to. to get there too for me. So yeah. I do think relationships, romantic relationships, or to me, that's kind of maybe the most obvious category

of a lot of them or most of them. Even when they don't work, they tend to be worth it. But yeah, there are a lot of things in life that, yeah, they're not worth it if they don't work out. And it's, I think maybe,

maybe the value of that question is spot those things beforehand and just don't get too invested. The Buddhists had that one figured out. Like, don't get too attached. Yeah. There's something, to it. What's your big takeaway from this episode? Oh, I think one of the most eye-opening sections for me

anyway was definitely like the mastery versus performance goals. Even though I kind of kind of knew that, I've heard about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation a lot before and I know all of that, but really seeing that put like front and center, a mastery goal being something that's like, no, no, no, it's like compare yourself to yourself. We've said it many times before. You've said it many times before. Put that right next to the performance goals though where you put all of this together where the measurement is external to you. Again, I knew all of that. I knew I've known all of that, but kind of putting that all together like this and this packaging that we had really showed me the areas of my life where I'm still doing that. And I didn't think I was, but I probably

am in a lot of different ways. So that was good to just kind of do a quick inventory. Is this a performance goal? Is this a master goal? Is this a master goal? Is this a performance goal? There was a performance goal. There was a lot of clarifying around this, this recent relationship that ended. I think there was some performance goals around that, too, for me that I had to really come to terms with. So, yeah. In the realm of relationships, performance goals are like very corrosive. Like, they really, they backfire entirely. Well, and they're very hard to see, too. There's a social script for you or a, here's the thing you're supposed to do. And you get validated for them. Exactly. It's what other people look and see to judge whether your relationships are working or not. So

I thought there was a lot of interesting research around you feel this thing of failure, even if you don't agree with people's judgments of you, even if you don't know the people, even if you're alone, even if there aren't people around you, like, it still stinks in every circumstance. I thought that was really fascinating. There are a lot of research tidbits in this one that I wasn't aware of prior. But I think for me, you know, I mentioned at the top of the show that I think subtle art really kind of gave failure a kind of a conventional mid-2010s, you know,

failures the way forward, you know, stick it out, learn from it. Don't take it personally. Like all the kind of the generic advice that's pretty common these days. I was just very satisfied with how deep we got with this one. Again, we tend to think of failure and success as this binary thing that we imagine that there's, there are people out there that are just successful at everything they do or they're successful at the vast majority of the things that they do. But the slippery definitional nature of failure and the relativity of it and how it is like very uniquely tied to our self definition and our expectations for ourselves and how it's universally experienced. Like you can you can take whatever person you think is the most successful

at whatever you want to point out, the majority of that person's experience is probably going to be a failure, which is fucked up, right? It's like, it's almost like our conventional notions of success are almost like these surfaces that we can only see on other people. We can never see on ourselves. And the internal lived experiences of this constant, everlasting cycle of failures and processing those failures, learning from those failures, moving on from those failures. So I really enjoyed the kind of the philosophical depth that this got to. Yeah, yeah. Um, I actually didn't expect it to go there. I'm glad we finally did our little religion section.

You know, keep the people happy. But yeah, this one was much more of an intellectual kind of thing for me. As you pointed out, I think I tend to handle failure pretty well in my life. So there were fewer like a haas for me, but some fun, fun intellectual adventures. You've been talking about this for a long time, too. Defining your own metrics. You've been talking about that for a long time. That was in the subtle art.

That was an old blog post you did. You've been talking about this for a long time. So I think you've had a lot of time to internalize it. And I actually think some of the frameworks in this episode, I think probably did a better job of explaining or grounding those ideas than the book did. Well, I guess it's time to quit. Quit the episode. Let's quit it. That is time to quit. Intelligent failure here. Intelligent failure. We will see how this one does. And then we will learn from it. That is all for today's episode, everybody. Thank you for listening for sticking with us. As always, you can get a free PDF guide with all of our research, references, citations, exercises, everything. Totally free. You can review it whenever you want. Go to solvepodcast.com slash failure.

Check that out. Sign up for the newsletter so you can get notified when the next episode's come out. And please follow us, give us a review on whatever platform you're listening to this on. It's the best thing you can do to support the show. Here's a challenge for you guys. Go find your friend that is the big. biggest failure in your life and send them this episode. And then tell them, I think you need this.

Let us know how that goes. And then let us know how that goes in the comments. All right. Thank you, everybody.