December 11, 2024 • 21 mins
What makes failure one of the most crucial experiences in our daily lives? How can viewing failure as a path to growth transform our mindset? Why is it essential to embrace failure as a stepping stone rather than a setback? And how does the act of rising after failure shape resilience and personal success?
Join me and find out!
Hope you enjoy and if you like my content, drop me a follow and find me on Instagram @stoicspirituality, Tiktok @stoicspirituality, and Youtube @stoicspirituality
Find my other podcast episodes and platforms here: https://rss.com/podcasts/stoicspirituality/
If you would like one-on-one mindset coaching, schedule a sample session with me:
https://calendly.com/stoicspiritualitylifecoaching/sample-session?month=2023-04
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
What is it that makes failure one of the most important things we as humans can experience in our daily lives?
(00:10):
Why is it important to see failure as growth as opposed to being shot down?
And why is it more important to get back up than have suffered the failure in the first place?
Hello and welcome back to Stoic Spirituality, a podcast where I look through, dissect and analyze various quotes, thoughts or books that I've read or encountered in these last few years.
(00:37):
My name is Juggen and I'm a student of the human experience trying to spread some knowledge out to the rest of the world.
So I've been kind of gone for the last few months trying to explore a few other projects and interests, but we've gone ideally back into a more consistent schedule of uploading podcasts.
So through this episode, we're going to delve back into this idea of stoicism and a little bit of practical philosophy around this idea of failure.
(01:05):
Because failure is something that we all experience all the time and maybe manifest in small scales or big scales.
It may be in personal struggles, it may be at work, situations may vary and the feelings we may feel may be unique, but the commonality is the presence of something such as failure.
(01:28):
And so ideally through this episode, we're going to discuss a little bit of how failure operates in our minds, what we should really focus on as opposed to the result,
and what the more important question than the presence of the failure actually is.
So join me and let's begin.
(01:50):
So as I mentioned before, failure and adversity are unique to each of us.
They're unique and they're not.
Failure and adversity takes a form for us that no one else may have experienced, denying of a promotion, something common, but the way we react is unique.
(02:12):
Having someone passive aggressively jab at you, something a lot of us may have experienced, but the way we react, the way we internalize it, the way we respond is unique.
And so why failure and adversity is unique is that we as human beings are unique, both on the biological scale of the way our DNA has been created at the specific time and place,
(02:39):
but it's also not unique because all of us experience it in some way, shape or form with many of us going through very similar situations.
And so what makes failure something that is so vitally important is the lessons it brings.
So success while motivating, while creating this feeling that you are on the right path, does not have the same lesson that failure does beyond what I'm doing right now is working.
(03:14):
Let's continue this operation.
However, failure has something uniquely powerful to it.
It forces you to take a step back, analyze what isn't working and find a new path that may even be better than the initial success you had in the first place.
Failure forces us to self-reflect.
(03:37):
It forces us to take a step back from what we're doing currently and analyze a new potential way we can do something.
It forces us to think outside of the box or kind of take off the blinds that have been covering us from other perspectives.
Because a failure, as many of you may have experienced, is kind of like a physical gut punch where the breath is knocked out of us,
(04:04):
where we hit the ground and we're forced to take in breaths to recover ourselves and to stand up and then respond to what's been leveled toward us.
And so failure is very humbling.
Failure will cause us to come down to our knees and kind of take a step back and figure what am I going to do next.
(04:31):
The same way failure is humbling, having ego during failure is something that is incredibly dangerous.
Ego as a concept seeks to lash out, seeks to attribute causes of failure, seeks to attribute even changes in characteristics to everyone but ourselves.
(04:53):
The pride that we contain from too many even successes is that we tend to attribute any changes, any wrongdoings to everyone but ourselves.
And failure is meant to teach you a lesson. And if you choose to blame it on everyone but yourself,
(05:14):
not only are you not going to learn a lesson, but if the situation arises again, you will find yourself making the same mistake over and over again
because you haven't been able to learn from your previous one.
And so what failure causes us to do, and what we must do rather with failure, is deal with the situation that has been placed in front of us.
(05:37):
So a lot of us take a look at failure and we either repress it or brush it aside.
We put it away in a cabinet, locked away in our subconscious, never to be seen again because it shows a negative reflection of us,
particularly if we're being asked to perform in front of someone who writes our evaluations or someone who is a higher up.
But what we must do in order to learn from a situation, become better, and ensure we don't make the same mistake again,
(06:03):
is you must deal with the situation when it appears.
We must allow ourselves to take in the fact that we messed up, and that not only will we not make the same mistake again,
but we will learn other skills, other things you may not have thought of, through an experience such as this.
(06:26):
For instance, if you're presenting to a large audience and you messed up one of your slides,
not only will you be given or rather be making sure in the future that you do not end up or you double check or triple check your slides that are not there,
you may also pick up on the fact that you're swaying while you're talking.
(06:50):
The power of failure allows you to reflect not only on the specific event that you messed up or the specific idea, quote, or whatever situation you messed up in,
but it forces you to also consider what other things I could improve upon. How else can I show up better?
Because success, if you do well, you get your applause, you walk away, you're like, okay, I did well.
(07:13):
It takes a very unique individual to look at success and think of what they can do after.
More often than not, the experience of failure causes us to kind of lower our own self-opinion and consider what we can do better.
And so failure also does not just happen to bad people or those who deserve it.
(07:35):
Failure happens to those who could have planned for everything and accounted for every single possible variable,
but it could still happen.
Life inherently isn't meant to give this equal balance out to everyone else.
Life is inherently going to have people that are going to win, people that are going to lose, people that are going to do well, people that are not going to do well, just by law of comparison.
(08:01):
And so it's important to understand that a failure is not a reflection of who you are as a person.
It doesn't mean you're a bad person, it doesn't mean that you are destined to have nothing work your way.
That is a version of an inferiority complex or even ego showing itself, pleading victimhood
and not allowing yourself to take in the situation objectively and see what you can do in the future to improve it.
(08:27):
Life isn't fair, good people fail as well, but a failure is not a reflection of you as a person.
And what an example of victimhood is also narcissistic injury.
It's where we as humans take the failure so personally, we identify with it so much, we take it into our pain body
(08:50):
that we almost lose track of what we're supposed to do in the future.
You almost lose track of what we're supposed to learn from the actual event and make it so much about me, me, me, me, me,
that we digress, we lose track of what's really important in the long run,
and we find ourselves just stuck in this dark black whirlpool that is like a positive feedback loop,
(09:15):
constantly feeding ourselves information that we're not worth it, we're an impostor here, we don't belong here, and such.
See events as events and see characteristics as characteristics.
It's not the two, for you will end up running into situations where you identify with events happening around you
as part of your personality and characteristics.
(09:38):
Because a fragile sense of self, an ego-based sense of self, will tell you either it's not my fault, it's not my problem,
someone else messed this up, the lights were dim which caused my concentration to waver,
or it'll say, oh, I did this, I messed up, I must take full accountability and I must drown in this agony of my failure
(10:01):
for the next few weeks or months until I have fully gotten rid of it or something else happens that will cause my ego to go up and down.
And so this kind of touches onto the effective ego even on failure, because ego as a concept,
just based on these examples, seems to be something that has a high amplitude going up and down, highs and lows,
(10:23):
goods and bads, but, and failures and success kind of make up these highs and lows of what ego is based on.
However, if you identify with the situation and see failure as a learning opportunity, there's never going to be any lows.
You'll never really fail. You'll just have an opportunity to improve upon your current methodology, your current way of life.
(10:45):
Because the greatest failing that you can do to your own self, beyond situations, beyond characteristics,
is seeing yourself as either more than you are or as less than you are.
Seeing yourself as superior to someone else simply because you had one more success than they did,
or seeing yourself as inferior to someone because you had one failure.
(11:08):
And the only way we can stop that is by disidentifying with situations and attributing them to our characteristics.
And so this kind of leads into the Bhagavad Gita in a sense, the idea of Karma Yoga, the idea of action being enough.
So the Bhagavad Gita talks about this idea of not taking in your fruits of your action,
(11:34):
or not worrying about your fruits of your action.
Karma Yoga, which is the yoga of action, talks about what you're responsible for and what the world is responsible for.
You are responsible for the idea of sticking to what is important, what is in front of you,
keeping the main thing the main thing, and doing what you know is right based on the information you have at the current moment.
(11:59):
Being just, having temperance and wisdom and courage in all that you do,
but worrying not about the fruits of your actions, what comes as a result.
Because you're only in control of so much.
You don't have any control over people's reactions, people's thoughts, other people's events, other events that happen around you, even natural disasters as an example.
(12:22):
We have no control over a majority of them.
But, if you know you put in the effort to the best of your ability,
and you know that you did what you could to make the best out of a situation,
the results not only will not matter as much, but you will tend to do better than you will expect.
Someone who is so focused on the outcome, the destination, will not focus on the journey and what they learned,
(12:46):
and will identify so much with getting to the top of this mountain that they will forget the amount of steps they had to take
and the happiness and the little lows and the failures they had as they worked their way up the mountain.
We have minimal control over the rewards that come in front of us.
We should set our metric or set our ideology of success and failure,
(13:08):
not in the external results that we have no control over,
but rather in the fact that we worked as hard as we could.
Because the work is your responsibility, the rest is not.
The rest is the universe's.
And so, you kind of may see the kind of way I'm trying to go with this,
(13:30):
which is curving away from allowing yourself to base your successes, your failures, your happiness, your sadness on other people,
on external events, or other situations you have no complete control over.
Rather asking you to base what you consider a success or a failure on your own self.
(13:52):
Stake it on your own self, on your own internal sense of self, as opposed to an external thing.
Ambition, while good in doses, has a lot to do with tying your well-being, your sense of self, your ideology of yourself,
to other things outside of you, to other people, to other situations, to you getting a promotion.
(14:16):
That's what ambition has. And it's not a bad thing to want to move up in the world.
It's a natural, like, I've done this work, I believe I deserve it, and it's good.
However, when you identify so much with this ambition, and you lose track of the journey that took you to this point,
and when your mind fills more with ego than with humility and grace, you kind of get the sense of insanity
(14:42):
where you check every so often for this result. You stake your entire livelihood on it, you identify so much with it
that when and if it doesn't happen, you lose track of the reality you were living at the time.
Because the world, the universe is indifferent to what humans quote-unquote want.
(15:03):
The world sings its own song. The world has its own path. The universe has its own path.
May it be through the idea of free will or predestination, depending on how you see it,
there is an inherent sense of order and chaos in terms of entropy to the universe.
And it's not gonna really bow to your whims if it's not meant to be.
(15:24):
So identifying with something that is simply just not meant to be sometimes is only gonna cause you more pain and misery in the long run.
And remember, one philosophy of stoicism talks about kind of landing before you're ready, getting started before you're ready,
and even failing before you're ready.
(15:47):
Because a lot of us, we like to tie every single lace in our shoe three, four times.
We like to make sure we have every single thing accounted for, no stone unturned, no detail overlooked,
and just thorough examination of everything we're doing before we even start.
(16:08):
And while this is important in situations where thorough examination is required,
a lot of us kind of facilitate by doing this as an excuse for focusing and getting our actual initiative started.
We spend so much time dotting every single I and crossing every single T when the purpose of our current expedition
is to get things moving that we lose track of our actual growth.
(16:32):
Because all growth in a sense is a leap. It's making a call, making a decision, talking to someone, making a presentation,
putting yourself out there and allowing life to do the rest.
It's allowing yourself to take that leap off even when you're not fully ready,
giving in and surrendering to this idea of the uncertainty of life and the courage it would take to get there.
(16:56):
Because remember, courage, if it was something that was never required in your life, you'd be living a boring life.
You'd be living a day to day life that would just ask you to do the same things every single day
without stepping out of your comfort zone, without taking that next step forward,
without becoming someone you could be more proud of.
(17:18):
And that's what failure forces you to do sometimes.
That's what you must begin to do consciously, taking all growth as a leap
so that you do not find yourself sliding back into older ways
or becoming too comfortable in your current state of mind or current state of self.
(17:39):
And so the last portion of this episode is not only dedicated to the idea of the most important part of a failure success paradigm,
but it's also the most important philosophy we can have with the way we operate.
(18:00):
Failure is certain. Success may or may not be certain.
Our identification with either is completely up to the voice in our own heads.
We have every ability to respond to a situation in a negative or positive way, failure or success.
We can look at a situation that was a failure and see what I can do to improve it.
(18:24):
We can look at a situation that is a success and wonder how could we have done this better?
But regardless, we're all going to fail.
And while the initial failures are not going to be easy, because we may or may not be used to them,
our mindset may not be tuned to them, and we may not be hard enough to take them as lessons yet,
which is perfectly fine. And it's normal, because all of us have our own journey
(18:48):
that we have to undergo to get to a point where we can feel the power of failure as a teacher.
So the main question becomes, can you get back up?
Can you be disciplined enough to see a failure as a situational issue that you will address
(19:09):
and gain qualities from, or will you identify so much with it that you'll be paralyzed with fear for the future?
Because as Ryan Holiday says in one of his books, losing is not up to you.
But being a loser is.
Losing, having a failure, messing up, that's not up to you all the time.
(19:36):
Nerves can get the better of people.
People can have feedback that can just throw you off and mess up other parts of your presentation.
People can sabotage you in this world.
But being a loser, identifying with that and taking that in so much that you lose track of all the work that is positive that you've done,
(19:57):
is up to us.
We're all going to screw up, we're all going to relapse, no one stays undefeated in life.
But we have the choice to get ourselves back up, take the next step, and continue our journey,
appreciating the journey for what it is, as opposed to the destination it could be.
(20:21):
Because our discipline compels us to, and our future depends on it.
We can endure pain, but can we get up from it?
We can endure success and failure, but can we improve from it?
Can we become someone we're more proud of?
(20:43):
Gaining qualities and characteristics we're more fond of?
Or are we going to stay stagnant, identifying with the quote unquote failures we experience, unwilling to see past our own noses?
That is the question of failure versus success.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode on the idea of success versus failure,
(21:06):
our ability to get up and taking growth as a leap of faith as opposed to a gradual increase, sometimes.
If you'd like to hear more content, feel free to drop me a follow at Stoics Virtuality on YouTube,
TikTok, and Instagram where I post clips from these episodes if you want a little bit of a snapshot of how other episodes look.
Thank you so much for listening and see you guys next time.
What is it that makes failure one of the most important things we as humans can experience in our daily lives?
(00:10):
Why is it important to see failure as growth as opposed to being shot down?
And why is it more important to get back up than have suffered the failure in the first place?
Hello and welcome back to Stoic Spirituality, a podcast where I look through, dissect and analyze various quotes, thoughts or books that I've read or encountered in these last few years.
(00:37):
My name is Juggen and I'm a student of the human experience trying to spread some knowledge out to the rest of the world.
So I've been kind of gone for the last few months trying to explore a few other projects and interests, but we've gone ideally back into a more consistent schedule of uploading podcasts.
So through this episode, we're going to delve back into this idea of stoicism and a little bit of practical philosophy around this idea of failure.
(01:05):
Because failure is something that we all experience all the time and maybe manifest in small scales or big scales.
It may be in personal struggles, it may be at work, situations may vary and the feelings we may feel may be unique, but the commonality is the presence of something such as failure.
(01:28):
And so ideally through this episode, we're going to discuss a little bit of how failure operates in our minds, what we should really focus on as opposed to the result,
and what the more important question than the presence of the failure actually is.
So join me and let's begin.
(01:50):
So as I mentioned before, failure and adversity are unique to each of us.
They're unique and they're not.
Failure and adversity takes a form for us that no one else may have experienced, denying of a promotion, something common, but the way we react is unique.
(02:12):
Having someone passive aggressively jab at you, something a lot of us may have experienced, but the way we react, the way we internalize it, the way we respond is unique.
And so why failure and adversity is unique is that we as human beings are unique, both on the biological scale of the way our DNA has been created at the specific time and place,
(02:39):
but it's also not unique because all of us experience it in some way, shape or form with many of us going through very similar situations.
And so what makes failure something that is so vitally important is the lessons it brings.
So success while motivating, while creating this feeling that you are on the right path, does not have the same lesson that failure does beyond what I'm doing right now is working.
(03:14):
Let's continue this operation.
However, failure has something uniquely powerful to it.
It forces you to take a step back, analyze what isn't working and find a new path that may even be better than the initial success you had in the first place.
Failure forces us to self-reflect.
(03:37):
It forces us to take a step back from what we're doing currently and analyze a new potential way we can do something.
It forces us to think outside of the box or kind of take off the blinds that have been covering us from other perspectives.
Because a failure, as many of you may have experienced, is kind of like a physical gut punch where the breath is knocked out of us,
(04:04):
where we hit the ground and we're forced to take in breaths to recover ourselves and to stand up and then respond to what's been leveled toward us.
And so failure is very humbling.
Failure will cause us to come down to our knees and kind of take a step back and figure what am I going to do next.
(04:31):
The same way failure is humbling, having ego during failure is something that is incredibly dangerous.
Ego as a concept seeks to lash out, seeks to attribute causes of failure, seeks to attribute even changes in characteristics to everyone but ourselves.
(04:53):
The pride that we contain from too many even successes is that we tend to attribute any changes, any wrongdoings to everyone but ourselves.
And failure is meant to teach you a lesson. And if you choose to blame it on everyone but yourself,
(05:14):
not only are you not going to learn a lesson, but if the situation arises again, you will find yourself making the same mistake over and over again
because you haven't been able to learn from your previous one.
And so what failure causes us to do, and what we must do rather with failure, is deal with the situation that has been placed in front of us.
(05:37):
So a lot of us take a look at failure and we either repress it or brush it aside.
We put it away in a cabinet, locked away in our subconscious, never to be seen again because it shows a negative reflection of us,
particularly if we're being asked to perform in front of someone who writes our evaluations or someone who is a higher up.
But what we must do in order to learn from a situation, become better, and ensure we don't make the same mistake again,
(06:03):
is you must deal with the situation when it appears.
We must allow ourselves to take in the fact that we messed up, and that not only will we not make the same mistake again,
but we will learn other skills, other things you may not have thought of, through an experience such as this.
(06:26):
For instance, if you're presenting to a large audience and you messed up one of your slides,
not only will you be given or rather be making sure in the future that you do not end up or you double check or triple check your slides that are not there,
you may also pick up on the fact that you're swaying while you're talking.
(06:50):
The power of failure allows you to reflect not only on the specific event that you messed up or the specific idea, quote, or whatever situation you messed up in,
but it forces you to also consider what other things I could improve upon. How else can I show up better?
Because success, if you do well, you get your applause, you walk away, you're like, okay, I did well.
(07:13):
It takes a very unique individual to look at success and think of what they can do after.
More often than not, the experience of failure causes us to kind of lower our own self-opinion and consider what we can do better.
And so failure also does not just happen to bad people or those who deserve it.
(07:35):
Failure happens to those who could have planned for everything and accounted for every single possible variable,
but it could still happen.
Life inherently isn't meant to give this equal balance out to everyone else.
Life is inherently going to have people that are going to win, people that are going to lose, people that are going to do well, people that are not going to do well, just by law of comparison.
(08:01):
And so it's important to understand that a failure is not a reflection of who you are as a person.
It doesn't mean you're a bad person, it doesn't mean that you are destined to have nothing work your way.
That is a version of an inferiority complex or even ego showing itself, pleading victimhood
and not allowing yourself to take in the situation objectively and see what you can do in the future to improve it.
(08:27):
Life isn't fair, good people fail as well, but a failure is not a reflection of you as a person.
And what an example of victimhood is also narcissistic injury.
It's where we as humans take the failure so personally, we identify with it so much, we take it into our pain body
(08:50):
that we almost lose track of what we're supposed to do in the future.
You almost lose track of what we're supposed to learn from the actual event and make it so much about me, me, me, me, me,
that we digress, we lose track of what's really important in the long run,
and we find ourselves just stuck in this dark black whirlpool that is like a positive feedback loop,
(09:15):
constantly feeding ourselves information that we're not worth it, we're an impostor here, we don't belong here, and such.
See events as events and see characteristics as characteristics.
It's not the two, for you will end up running into situations where you identify with events happening around you
as part of your personality and characteristics.
(09:38):
Because a fragile sense of self, an ego-based sense of self, will tell you either it's not my fault, it's not my problem,
someone else messed this up, the lights were dim which caused my concentration to waver,
or it'll say, oh, I did this, I messed up, I must take full accountability and I must drown in this agony of my failure
(10:01):
for the next few weeks or months until I have fully gotten rid of it or something else happens that will cause my ego to go up and down.
And so this kind of touches onto the effective ego even on failure, because ego as a concept,
just based on these examples, seems to be something that has a high amplitude going up and down, highs and lows,
(10:23):
goods and bads, but, and failures and success kind of make up these highs and lows of what ego is based on.
However, if you identify with the situation and see failure as a learning opportunity, there's never going to be any lows.
You'll never really fail. You'll just have an opportunity to improve upon your current methodology, your current way of life.
(10:45):
Because the greatest failing that you can do to your own self, beyond situations, beyond characteristics,
is seeing yourself as either more than you are or as less than you are.
Seeing yourself as superior to someone else simply because you had one more success than they did,
or seeing yourself as inferior to someone because you had one failure.
(11:08):
And the only way we can stop that is by disidentifying with situations and attributing them to our characteristics.
And so this kind of leads into the Bhagavad Gita in a sense, the idea of Karma Yoga, the idea of action being enough.
So the Bhagavad Gita talks about this idea of not taking in your fruits of your action,
(11:34):
or not worrying about your fruits of your action.
Karma Yoga, which is the yoga of action, talks about what you're responsible for and what the world is responsible for.
You are responsible for the idea of sticking to what is important, what is in front of you,
keeping the main thing the main thing, and doing what you know is right based on the information you have at the current moment.
(11:59):
Being just, having temperance and wisdom and courage in all that you do,
but worrying not about the fruits of your actions, what comes as a result.
Because you're only in control of so much.
You don't have any control over people's reactions, people's thoughts, other people's events, other events that happen around you, even natural disasters as an example.
(12:22):
We have no control over a majority of them.
But, if you know you put in the effort to the best of your ability,
and you know that you did what you could to make the best out of a situation,
the results not only will not matter as much, but you will tend to do better than you will expect.
Someone who is so focused on the outcome, the destination, will not focus on the journey and what they learned,
(12:46):
and will identify so much with getting to the top of this mountain that they will forget the amount of steps they had to take
and the happiness and the little lows and the failures they had as they worked their way up the mountain.
We have minimal control over the rewards that come in front of us.
We should set our metric or set our ideology of success and failure,
(13:08):
not in the external results that we have no control over,
but rather in the fact that we worked as hard as we could.
Because the work is your responsibility, the rest is not.
The rest is the universe's.
And so, you kind of may see the kind of way I'm trying to go with this,
(13:30):
which is curving away from allowing yourself to base your successes, your failures, your happiness, your sadness on other people,
on external events, or other situations you have no complete control over.
Rather asking you to base what you consider a success or a failure on your own self.
(13:52):
Stake it on your own self, on your own internal sense of self, as opposed to an external thing.
Ambition, while good in doses, has a lot to do with tying your well-being, your sense of self, your ideology of yourself,
to other things outside of you, to other people, to other situations, to you getting a promotion.
(14:16):
That's what ambition has. And it's not a bad thing to want to move up in the world.
It's a natural, like, I've done this work, I believe I deserve it, and it's good.
However, when you identify so much with this ambition, and you lose track of the journey that took you to this point,
and when your mind fills more with ego than with humility and grace, you kind of get the sense of insanity
(14:42):
where you check every so often for this result. You stake your entire livelihood on it, you identify so much with it
that when and if it doesn't happen, you lose track of the reality you were living at the time.
Because the world, the universe is indifferent to what humans quote-unquote want.
(15:03):
The world sings its own song. The world has its own path. The universe has its own path.
May it be through the idea of free will or predestination, depending on how you see it,
there is an inherent sense of order and chaos in terms of entropy to the universe.
And it's not gonna really bow to your whims if it's not meant to be.
(15:24):
So identifying with something that is simply just not meant to be sometimes is only gonna cause you more pain and misery in the long run.
And remember, one philosophy of stoicism talks about kind of landing before you're ready, getting started before you're ready,
and even failing before you're ready.
(15:47):
Because a lot of us, we like to tie every single lace in our shoe three, four times.
We like to make sure we have every single thing accounted for, no stone unturned, no detail overlooked,
and just thorough examination of everything we're doing before we even start.
(16:08):
And while this is important in situations where thorough examination is required,
a lot of us kind of facilitate by doing this as an excuse for focusing and getting our actual initiative started.
We spend so much time dotting every single I and crossing every single T when the purpose of our current expedition
is to get things moving that we lose track of our actual growth.
(16:32):
Because all growth in a sense is a leap. It's making a call, making a decision, talking to someone, making a presentation,
putting yourself out there and allowing life to do the rest.
It's allowing yourself to take that leap off even when you're not fully ready,
giving in and surrendering to this idea of the uncertainty of life and the courage it would take to get there.
(16:56):
Because remember, courage, if it was something that was never required in your life, you'd be living a boring life.
You'd be living a day to day life that would just ask you to do the same things every single day
without stepping out of your comfort zone, without taking that next step forward,
without becoming someone you could be more proud of.
(17:18):
And that's what failure forces you to do sometimes.
That's what you must begin to do consciously, taking all growth as a leap
so that you do not find yourself sliding back into older ways
or becoming too comfortable in your current state of mind or current state of self.
(17:39):
And so the last portion of this episode is not only dedicated to the idea of the most important part of a failure success paradigm,
but it's also the most important philosophy we can have with the way we operate.
(18:00):
Failure is certain. Success may or may not be certain.
Our identification with either is completely up to the voice in our own heads.
We have every ability to respond to a situation in a negative or positive way, failure or success.
We can look at a situation that was a failure and see what I can do to improve it.
(18:24):
We can look at a situation that is a success and wonder how could we have done this better?
But regardless, we're all going to fail.
And while the initial failures are not going to be easy, because we may or may not be used to them,
our mindset may not be tuned to them, and we may not be hard enough to take them as lessons yet,
which is perfectly fine. And it's normal, because all of us have our own journey
(18:48):
that we have to undergo to get to a point where we can feel the power of failure as a teacher.
So the main question becomes, can you get back up?
Can you be disciplined enough to see a failure as a situational issue that you will address
(19:09):
and gain qualities from, or will you identify so much with it that you'll be paralyzed with fear for the future?
Because as Ryan Holiday says in one of his books, losing is not up to you.
But being a loser is.
Losing, having a failure, messing up, that's not up to you all the time.
(19:36):
Nerves can get the better of people.
People can have feedback that can just throw you off and mess up other parts of your presentation.
People can sabotage you in this world.
But being a loser, identifying with that and taking that in so much that you lose track of all the work that is positive that you've done,
(19:57):
is up to us.
We're all going to screw up, we're all going to relapse, no one stays undefeated in life.
But we have the choice to get ourselves back up, take the next step, and continue our journey,
appreciating the journey for what it is, as opposed to the destination it could be.
(20:21):
Because our discipline compels us to, and our future depends on it.
We can endure pain, but can we get up from it?
We can endure success and failure, but can we improve from it?
Can we become someone we're more proud of?
(20:43):
Gaining qualities and characteristics we're more fond of?
Or are we going to stay stagnant, identifying with the quote unquote failures we experience, unwilling to see past our own noses?
That is the question of failure versus success.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode on the idea of success versus failure,
(21:06):
our ability to get up and taking growth as a leap of faith as opposed to a gradual increase, sometimes.
If you'd like to hear more content, feel free to drop me a follow at Stoics Virtuality on YouTube,
TikTok, and Instagram where I post clips from these episodes if you want a little bit of a snapshot of how other episodes look.
Thank you so much for listening and see you guys next time.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Boysober
Have you ever wondered what life might be like if you stopped worrying about being wanted, and focused on understanding what you actually want? That was the question Hope Woodard asked herself after a string of situationships inspired her to take a break from sex and dating. She went "boysober," a personal concept that sparked a global movement among women looking to prioritize themselves over men. Now, Hope is looking to expand the ways we explore our relationship to relationships. Taking a bold, unfiltered look into modern love, romance, and self-discovery, Boysober will dive into messy stories about dating, sex, love, friendship, and breaking generational patterns—all with humor, vulnerability, and a fresh perspective.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com