“Mediocre people don’t etch despair into their souls, they convince themselves that the correct course is to not give up”

I’ve failed a lot in the past 6 months. I’ve had to switch careers. Give up on an essay I’ve been trying to write for months. Abandon my PR goals in the gym. Discard my Halloween plans. It’s safe to say that I should be at rock bottom. Despite this, I’ve been in pretty good spirits. I’ve been spending time with friends, I’ve continued to relax, and I’ve even picked up multiple new hobbies. I was always proud of my resilience, but it turns out I was celebrating my coping mechanism.

When I brushed off my failure to hit a bench PR, I thought “This is just a step in my journey.” In reality, I was blinding myself to the truth that I wasn’t strong enough. I was ignoring how I didn’t prioritize my sleep. I was forgetting that I had a donut for breakfast instead of a protein shake. The worst part is how long I continued to delude myself.

Hope is another word for Cope

Society instead pushes us down a specific track; a track of “pursuing your dreams”, a track of not being harsh on yourself, a track of accepting failure as a part of the process. Society tricked me into believing that will is all I needed. I told myself that the reason I failed was because “I didn’t try hard enough” and “I’ll get it next time.”

I was unwilling to acknowledge my mistakes and unconsciously make excuses by thinking that “Not Giving Up” is the right answer. This is a comfort blanket that we give our mind, that we don’t need to change or improve, we are sufficient and we just need to continue to do what we’re doing.

At this point, we’ve shifted away from achieving our dreams to merely chasing our dreams. You feel that it doesn’t matter that you failed this time or the next, as long as you don’t give up, you haven’t failed. This becomes an elaborate method of coping with your failure without admitting it to yourself.

I’ve been going to the gym for nearly 12 years now. During this time, I’ve never once been able to bench two plates, a goal that I’ve had for 8 of those years. Every year, I put it on my New Year’s resolution, but every year, I fail to actually come anywhere close. By continuing to not give up I was actually pushing away further from my goal. My
“resilience” was a sugar pill that kept me from taking the medicine of defeat.

Chasing a dream while being comfortable with losing is pointless. You need to admit to yourself:

You Just Lost.

Willingness to Despair

Everyone fails on the way to their goals, but what’s important is that when you fail, you embrace your failure and despair. This might seem counter-intuitive, but the benefits can be understood if we trace out the paths we can choose after failure.

Imagine yourself at a crossroads after failure. There are two options, 1) is to brush yourself off and not give up and 2) is to properly despair and admit you’ve failed. You took a path to get to where you are. You made certain decisions, certain actions, had a certain mindset. That mindset brought you to failure. So when you see the two choices it’s easy to see that the first choice keeps you on the same path. Going down the first road will do nothing but bring you back here.

In order to succeed, you need to abandon the path that lead you to failure. The only way forward is to accept that you’ve failed and to take the path of failure, glimpse your future after failure, and have the strength to pivot and evolve.

This isn’t a vague concept, but is instead reflected in some of the most successful people in the world. Elon Musk once cried about Tesla’s production issues during a NYT interview. Feeling despair to the point of publicly crying during an interview gave Musk the momentum to allow Tesla to evolve into the behemoth it is today.

Ability to Evolve

Admitting that you’ve failed allows you to feel the sadness and consequences of your current actions. Despair exposes you to your weaknesses, bad choices, and gives you the drive required to change. Properly feeling despair is a sign that you’re willing to adapt to achieve your dreams.

Motivational posters say that the choices after failure are: 1) Continue to fight for your goals or 2) Abandon your goals. This isn’t true. As I said above, the two choices are instead to accept the failure or delude yourself. Just continuing towards your dreams isn’t enough, you also need to accept your failures and embrace despair to allow yourself to change.