Chapter 7. Failure is the way forward

Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of our success is based on how many times we have failed at something.

If someone is better than us, it’s likely because she has failed at it more than we have. If someone is worse than us, it’s likely because he has not been through all of the painful learning experiences we have.

A young child trying to learn to walk will fall and hurt himself many times, but at no point does the child thinks that walking is not for him and I am not good at it.

Most of us reach a place where we are afraid to fail, and we start avoiding failure.

We can be truly successful at something we are willing to fail at. If we are unwilling to die, then we are reluctant to succeed.

Many people, when they feel some form of pain or anger or sadness, drop everything and attend to numbing out whatever they are feeling.

They aim to return to feeling good as quickly as possible, even if that means returning to their shitty values.

Marc shares the learning from his Maths teacher that if you are stuck on a problem, don’t just sit and think about it. Instead, start working on it.

Even if you don’t know what you are doing, working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to appear in your head.

Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.

Action is always within our reach. We can become our source of motivation. We can become our source of inspiration. And with simply doing something as our only metric of success- then failure pushes us forward.