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Facing and Overcoming Failure (Episode 71)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
“Must I be wasting my time sitting in a corner when I might have been crowned at Olympia?”
In this conversation, we discuss failure, how to avoid it, and how to deal with it when it happens. We end by revealing personal experiences with failure.
“And what advantage does a wrestler gain from his training partner? The greatest.”
(01:57) Introduction
(10:40) How To Avoid Failure
(21:54) How To Deal With Failure
(27:50) Contemplating Adversity
(34:52) Failure as Practice
(40:06) Failure as Indifferent
(44:46) Free for All
(48:53) Personal Failure
***
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Transcript
Understanding Failure in Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
So that I think is an overcompensation because I think the point you made, which is like failure should be information. So if you treat failure like a badge of honor, you're just like repurposing it for another emotional state. You're not treating it like information, like it should be information, but I think some people are so failure averse. They could benefit from swinging so far the other way and saying like, no, it's going to be, it's going to be a good thing.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:00:41
Speaker
In this conversation, Michael and I discuss failure, how stoics avoid it, how to deal with it when it happens, and our personal experiences failing. As always, if you find these conversations informative, useful, motivating, the best way you can help is by sharing it with a friend. And it's great to see many people, in fact, doing that, whether it's on Reddit, Facebook, various discords.
00:01:07
Speaker
And I should say that Michael and I are going to be running a course, a three-week course called Stoicism Applied. Learn more at stoameditation.com slash course.
Stoicism Applied Course Introduction
00:01:22
Speaker
It will be three weeks of focusing systematically on the three Stoic disciplines as they are revealed in Epictetus. And of course, they're going to be concerned with the theory, but also most importantly, the practice.
00:01:37
Speaker
All right, here's our conversation on failure. Welcome to Stole Conversations. My name is Caleb Antavaros. And I'm Michael Trombley. And today we're going to be talking about failure. Michael put together some notes to structure our conversation for this, so I'll hand it off to him.
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, something I know very much about, but I thought this was a good topic for conversation because it's something that cuts across all parts of life, the fear of failure, the potential for failure.
Failure and Stoicism: A Personal Perspective
00:02:09
Speaker
And specifically I wanted to talk about the stoic approach to failing, both how to avoid failure, I guess, and then secondly, how to deal with failure when it does occur.
00:02:21
Speaker
And I think failure is a very personal kind of hardship, right? Because it's almost not something that happens to you, but something that you almost participate in, right? The easiest way to avoid failure is a kind of nihilism, a kind of nothing matters. I shouldn't care about anything. And if I don't care about anything, I'll never be disappointed.
00:02:41
Speaker
And I don't want people to think that stoicism is a kind of nihilism. I don't think the stoic approach to failure is a nihilistic one. And so I want to kind of flesh out that stoic middle ground between I can't fail because nothing matters and maybe you feel like you're failing all the time or you're having a hard time dealing with the fact that you encounter these kind of problems.
00:03:06
Speaker
So the way I structured the conversation is first just what is failure wouldn't be a philosophy podcast without some definitions. And then first we'll be again on avoiding failure, what the stoics say about avoiding failure strategies for dealing with
Character Over Circumstance in Stoicism
00:03:17
Speaker
failure. And then finally our reflections. And I asked you to prepare this. So we both can talk a bit about a time that we failed and.
00:03:25
Speaker
Maybe how stoicism helped with that or how it didn't or did not, but what it was like experiencing that and whether we use these tools and to what success. Does that sound good? Jump into it? Yeah, that sounds great. Let's do it. Cool.
00:03:40
Speaker
So what is failure? First thought, let's define it. I put here failure is when you fail to do what you set out to do, which is not a great definition because I got fail in there, but it is failure. I think is the important thing is that you've the way at least I'm going to define it and talk about it. It's when you set out a task for yourself or a goal for yourself.
00:04:01
Speaker
you've committed to that task or goal, and then it doesn't occur, right? So it's not, it's not failure if you say, I'm going to try my best at this sport, and then you lose.
00:04:16
Speaker
You didn't fail because your goal was to try your best. It's failure when you say I'm going to win and then you lose, right? And stoicism at its core is, I put here almost the ultimate anti-failure philosophy.
00:04:31
Speaker
in that if you believe stoicism or you become a stoic, you actually shelter yourself from most kinds of failure because stoicism does not rely on what's often called moral luck or doesn't believe the quality of our life is luck dependent.
00:04:51
Speaker
So stoicism says, look, what, what, what makes you a good person, what makes a good life is the quality of your character. The quality of your character is up to you. And so because of that, the kinds of failure that people, that people often have to wrestle with, we say maybe, uh,
00:05:07
Speaker
work failure, a social failure, maybe a kind of professional failure or maybe even just an ego based failure you think wow I'm going to be a great person I'm going to be really successful I'm going to be very popular I'm going to be this or that these kind of external goals that are not up to you
00:05:27
Speaker
Stoicism, once you become a stoic, you're kind of sheltered from those in a sense, because you will stop having many of those, of those kinds of aspirations or those goals. And so you're protected from those, but you're
Strategies for Cultivating Virtue
00:05:41
Speaker
not protected from all kinds of failures. And another thing that I wanted to say here is that if you take that to its natural conclusion, you, we, even if we say, you know, the quality of our life just depends on us, we still need some strategies for cultivating our own virtue.
00:05:57
Speaker
And we're still going to fail or wrestle with being a good better or worse person. Even if we, if we transfer the goal onto our own character, we're still going to fail to be good, have good characters or fail to be courageous, fail to be kind, fail to be generous.
00:06:13
Speaker
And so we need some strategies a for cultivating those virtues, but then strategies for dealing with failure, even that stoic sense, you're still going to fail as a stoic, just maybe not as much or in as many ways as you would as a non stoic, or you won't be exposed to as many different kinds as a non stoic.
00:06:30
Speaker
So that's really what I'm looking at. I'm looking at times when we set out, when we set projects for ourselves. Let's all say that. We set kind of projects or goals. The outcome matters. We commit to an outcome and it doesn't occur.
00:06:45
Speaker
What is the stomach strategy for dealing with that? What is the way of confronting that? And there's a lot of upsides because as I said before, if you're entirely failure averse, you won't really commit to anything. You won't try because failure is a kind of a natural consequence of attempting anything. So we want to be prepared. We want to be brave towards failure.
00:07:07
Speaker
But we also want to not be nihilistic. We want to say, well, if I, if I tried to do this thing and I didn't do it, if I tried to be a good person and I kind of acted like a jerk, well, that also matters. That also, that should bug me a bit. So, you know, what are the stoic strategies for finding the middle ground there is what I wanted to dig into. Anything else on the framing of failure before we jump into it?
00:07:29
Speaker
I think that's well put. So when we're talking about failure, I think it's important we're not necessarily talking about mistakes, though of course those could overlap. But instead we're talking about, as you say, setting out to do something, committing to it, and then either not following through or experiencing our plans, our goals, whatever it is, being frustrated.
00:07:57
Speaker
So and that's an experience, a very human experience, an experience everyone is going to have. And if you don't have it in many domains, you know, that's always a sign that you might not be pushing yourself
The Stoic Dichotomy of Control
00:08:12
Speaker
hard enough.
00:08:13
Speaker
If you have it too often, maybe that's a sign you're in the wrong domain or you're pushing yourself too hard. Always hard to make those sorts of judgments, but regardless, failure is something one can expect.
00:08:28
Speaker
There's an important question about what's my attitude towards it, why I should either avoid it nor become so happy with the prospect of failing to do what I get that I lose sight of, all the motivation for me setting out on this project beforehand that I lose sight of doing my best.
00:08:56
Speaker
So it's really an interesting complex topic and yeah, let's chat more about how to avoid it and how to deal with it when it happens.
00:09:08
Speaker
Yeah, before we get there, I want to dig back into that mistake versus failure, because that's, I think, a good distinction. I would say a mistake is a kind of a wrong turn on a step towards the goal. Failure is you didn't achieve the goal, right? So, you know, a mistake is an athlete analogy. A mistake is you made a bad play.
00:09:30
Speaker
The failure is you lost the game. Maybe the mistake is you lost a race two years out from the Olympics. The failure is you, you didn't win the Olympic gold medal. If that was your goal, there's this kind of, and I think that's important because I just want people listening.
00:09:45
Speaker
and myself included, to just make that distinction because we can often conflate the two. And there's this concept in app design or in a startup or things like this where it's like, this comes from IDEO, which is a design firm. It's this idea of fail fast, fail often. But I think I would say you're not really failing. And so the idea is to make something and then put it in front of users right away so they can tell you what's wrong with it. And then you can change and update, update, update, right? You kind of iterate.
00:10:13
Speaker
But I think in that case, you're not really failing, right? Because your goal wasn't to get it right the first time. Your goal was to engage in a process that would produce something good at the end. So you're not failing fast, failing often. You're making, if you want to make this failure mistake, you're making a lot of mistakes with the understanding that's actually the process you want to be in.
00:10:32
Speaker
So I'm, we're talking about that really kind of severe end state of, of, you know, I wanted this thing, I set out to do it and I didn't do it. So the first thing, the first thing that Stoics have to say, and I alluded this to this a bit at the start that I get into is how to avoid failure altogether. Because I think this is one of the appeals of stoicism is it actually makes you more robust. And one of the ways you become more robust.
00:10:56
Speaker
is not by becoming indifferent to failure because we said that's kind of in a nihilistic perspective, but becoming really clear in your goals, really clear about what actually constitutes a failure versus I would say maybe what just constitutes a mistake or what constitutes not actually something that isn't actually going against your goal.
Metaphors and Lessons in Stoic Practice
00:11:20
Speaker
And so the
00:11:21
Speaker
first way that the South get you to avoid failure and then have this kind of this more robust life is by practicing the dichotomy of control. So when you don't want to dichotomy of control, again, is there some things up to you, some things not up to you, and you should focus on the things up to you, the things up to you being the choices you make, your reaction to situations, basically how you how you psychologically deal with the world, your character. And when you shrink the thing that you really care about to your character,
00:11:53
Speaker
This removes maybe 90% of failure states. So when being an athlete becomes not about winning the Olympics, but about cultivating character, then this becomes the obstacle is the way. Then everything that happens when you lose the Olympics, well, great, I can turn that into a way to cultivate character, to cultivate resiliency.
00:12:19
Speaker
And so what the Stoics do by shifting the goal, the ultimate goal of life from one of external success to internal success, from the part of the dichotomy that's outside of you to the part of dichotomy that's inside of you, that any sort of failure state or mistake in the external world just becomes fuel, motivation, inspiration, evidence for that internal state.
00:12:44
Speaker
And so those things no longer become failures, not in a nihilistic way, not like when you see an eight year old says, well, I didn't care anyway. I lost the race, but I didn't even care. Like not like that. You, but you genuinely didn't care that you lost the race because what you do genuinely care about is your character. So that it protects you, but it protects you not in a, I guess in a trivial or juvenile way, it protects you by, by recentering yourself in this kind of growth mindset.
00:13:13
Speaker
And I think that's really, really cool. And so what you do is you, in any situation you encounter, you say, well, look, I'm going to, I'm going to want to excel as an athlete, but only for the purpose of cultivating my character. And so everything kind of comes back onto that. And so any failure as an athlete is only a failure in so far as it reflects a poor character. If it doesn't reflect a poor character, you know, someone else was more athletic than you. Maybe you had an injury.
00:13:41
Speaker
maybe you just made a simple mistake that could happen to anybody, that doesn't actually constitute failure, it just constitutes more fuel for that character fire. And one way that I think that the Stoics do a really good job of this is what's called the reserve clause.
00:13:58
Speaker
So this is when you say, well, look, I'm going to try to do something in the external world. I'm going to, I'll read a quote in a second. I'm going to go to the bath house and I'm going to hang out, but that's only going to be a goal in so far as it supports kind of maintaining a good character. And I'm not going to let the pursuit of that goal compromise my character. So this is a quote from Epictetus.
00:14:21
Speaker
This is Enchiridion or Handbook 4. And Epictetus says, when you're about to embark on any action, remind yourself what kind of action it is. If you're going to go out to take a bath, set before your mind the things that happen at baths, that people splash you, that people knock against you, that people steal from you. And you'll thus undertake the action in a sure manner if you say to yourself at the outset, I want to take a bath and ensure at the same time that my choice remains in harmony with nature.
00:14:51
Speaker
So by choice in harmony with nature, he means your prohyrasis is your choice. That's the part of you that makes decisions, your rational faculty in harmony with nature. That's still a thing of living in accordance with nature, just a good character. So that's the first, I think that's the first thing that I want to clarify. And I think something that's really cool, you escape a lot of failure.
00:15:14
Speaker
But without becoming nihilistic, because you shift the ultimate goal to one internal instead of external. And because of that, your external failures, you know, you get fired, you, you know, you, you get.
00:15:29
Speaker
You have a kind of a get dumped, you have kind of a relationship issue, something like this. Those just become kind of evidence. Obstacle is the way criteria for the actual goal to protect yourself against the external failure, not by not caring, but by recontextualizing what really matters.
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah, I would say that this is one of the places where I think Stoe says that makes the most sense, you know, focuses your attention on what matters doing your best.
00:16:03
Speaker
where your attention shouldn't be ensuring that every external outcome you want is achieved because you just don't have 100% control over that. So in what sense should you completely invest yourself in achieving some goal when it's not entirely up to you?
00:16:33
Speaker
So this is I think one of the key sort of stoic insights, this insight of the dichotomy of control, this fundamental divide between what is up to you, what is your own, and what is not. I think there's an illustrative story about this why
00:16:48
Speaker
about one of the presidents of the US, Jimmy Carter. So he applied to a nuclear submarine program before he was president. And he's going through this lengthy interview process. And the interviewer asks him, you know, how did you rank in the Naval Academy? A very prestigious, difficult training program.
00:17:11
Speaker
And Jimmy Carter says something like, I was 60th out of 900. So pretty good. But then the interviewer follows up with, did you try your best? And instinctively, Jimmy Carter is about to answer, yes, yeah, I did do my best. But of course, he pauses and he thinks at every single moment, did he do his best? And he says, no, no, sir, I didn't. And the interviewer
00:17:36
Speaker
all he says is why not and then he walks out the room which is an awesome illustration i think of how
00:17:47
Speaker
This stoic view on failure does protect yourself from the randomness of the world. It helps you form this inner citadel, but also at the same time calls you to do your best with what is up to you.
Balancing External and Internal Focus
00:18:06
Speaker
And that's how, as you were explaining earlier, Michael, it doesn't fall into this trap of, you know, oh, I fail. It's not really up to me. It said the focus is on
00:18:15
Speaker
did I do my best if it was up to me? Did I think well as well as I could have? Did I make excellent judgments, make excellent decisions? And that's not easy. I think if we look back on many periods of our life and ask that same question, did I do my best? Often the answer, we're going to need to pause and it's probably admit, no we didn't
00:18:37
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Like, like you can still fail as a stoic, right? You just, you're just failing in, in the, in this Citadel, right? You're just failing to, as you said, you're, you're. So there's, I think the Jimmy Carter example is great. Right. Caleb. So Jimmy Carter didn't fail because he came 60th. He failed because he didn't try his hardest. And one of those outside of his control, right? If you try your hardest and you come 60th.
00:19:04
Speaker
There's nothing left you can do. You just don't, you don't have the genetic disposition. You were born in the wrong year when too many other smart people were born. Like you just don't have it, right? But so, so there's this, I guess this kind of vulnerability in that sense, and this kind of this aspect that's outside of your control in terms of the internal trying, that's always within your control. But even as a stoic, you can still fail to do that, right? You can fail to act well. You can fail to try hard.
00:19:33
Speaker
Yeah, I like that story. It's a fun one. So what I wanted to add to this then is, you know, it's all good and fine to say this, but I guess there's two things I want to say is one is that you don't want to take the kind of novice perspective. I'm novice. That's condescending.
00:19:51
Speaker
But I see a lot of people, beginners or people that begin to study stoicism in literally in terms of their time, who are like, well, again, they just adopt a kind of nihilism they call stoicism. Well, nothing external to me matters. This doesn't, it's not up to me. So who cares? You don't want to do that. The way to really get into this position where you both try your hardest at the Naval Academy and don't care that you came 60th.
00:20:16
Speaker
That's the ultimate stoic position. That's really, really, really hard to get to. Right. And most, most people like, like myself are going to be kind of in this intermediary position where, look, I'm going to care about some things that aren't just my character.
00:20:33
Speaker
Right. I'm going to care how I do professionally. I'm going to care what people think of me. And I just accept that I try my best to not care too much or not care of what the wrong people think or the wrong kinds of things. But I'm still, I'm not going to achieve that kind of perfect balance. And I'd rather, I'd rather be the kind of person that cares and be engaged in that.
00:20:55
Speaker
as an intermediate because that for me is better than passivity.
Stoic Strategies for Overcoming Failure
00:21:01
Speaker
It's better to be out there trying to navigate these external situations well, while balancing doing that, while focusing on your character. It's the reserve clause, right? I'm trying to get out there, take a bath, and also not care that people are splashing me. But this doesn't happen to us anymore. At least I don't know bath houses in Toronto that I've been to.
00:21:23
Speaker
but i'm trying to take a bath without caring that people splash me but sometimes i get a little upset that people splash me and it's this whole kind of stuff gets mixed in together so we're still gonna fail as stoics you know not everybody's a hardcore stoic and even if you are you might not be 100 committed to the idea so you're still gonna fail as a stoic even if you are a hardcore stoic and you just care about your character you're still gonna fail to have a perfect character unless you're a sage so
00:21:46
Speaker
With this, this advice is helpful. This, this dichotomy of control, like super profound, super helpful, but it's not the full story. So the next part I want to talk about is, well, how do you deal with failure as a stoic? Right? What does it look like to deal with failure as a stoic? Either because you failed to act well internally.
00:22:05
Speaker
Or, you know, because you did, because you did care about something because, you know, you're not a sage or you don't fully agree with the stoicism and that thing didn't go the way you wanted it to. Right. So I have four strategies here that I tried to pull out and I pulled them all out from Epictetus, which is, which is, you know, one of my go-to go-to stoics.
00:22:25
Speaker
So the first strategy for dealing with failure is to recognize that failure is a necessary part of trying to be good. It happens when we put theory into practice and to not fail is to not try. So I have a quote from Epictetus here. I find these ones really inspiring. This is from his Discourses, Book One, Chapter 29. He's talking here to students
00:22:50
Speaker
who are afraid to leave the school and go out and enter the world of the regular life, the non-student life, and that they're afraid. They're like, I don't want to sit here and keep studying Stoicism. And Epictetus says, when the moment calls, you have to burst into tears and say, I want to continue my studies. Study what? If you didn't learn these things so as to be able to put them into practice, why did you learn them in the first place?
00:23:17
Speaker
I imagine that there must be someone among those who are sitting here who feels the labor pains within his mind and says, why is it that a difficulty does not fall upon me now, such as that man had to face? Must I be wasting my time sitting in a corner when I might have been crowned at Olympia?
00:23:36
Speaker
And what Epictetus does, it means the same kind of thing that we were talking about here about moving that battle internally. And so Epictetus uses this metaphor where he talks often about the real Olympics as being the internal battle to be a good person. That's the real Olympics. That's the real test. But that's a test that you can succeed or fail at. You can be brave or not, generous or not, kind or not.
00:24:00
Speaker
And so when his students are afraid to go out there and encounter difficult situations and act well, he's kind of like, what's the point of studying, right? You want to fail because you want to try to be a good person. You want to try to be put in these situations. And what you're really looking for, what he wants out of a stoic is someone who actually is upset when other people get these opportunities and says, look, well,
00:24:25
Speaker
Oh, do I have to be wasting my time in a corner when I could have been crowned at Olympia, when I could have been like an Olympic champion, that being that, that, that success. So, I mean, I think this is, this is, this is just something that's important to remind yourself, right? Which is that.
00:24:40
Speaker
When you attempt to cultivate your character or any long-term goal, if you care and stretch yourself hard enough and challenge yourself, you will fail. And that's not to say that that failure doesn't matter, that failure does matter, right? If you act poorly in the moment, if you're a bad person, if you're a bad friend, that failure does matter.
00:24:59
Speaker
But it's also a part of that process of cultivating that. And it's a part of only the people that attempt that can have the opportunity to do otherwise, to be good friends, to be kind, generous, courageous. So that kind of acceptance of the inevitability of failure is one of the, I'd say the first stoic strategy for dealing with failure, accepting that.
00:25:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's related to this question, you know, why aren't you a sage already? And there are many complex answers to that, different ways to attack that question.
00:25:35
Speaker
Behind it, part of the answer is that we are imperfect beings trying to fix ourselves with imperfect tools. One of the traditional Stoic answers to this sort of question was, you grew up in a corrupt society and you've ingrained all of these judgments since childhood. Musonius has a nice line about this, Musonius Rufus.
00:26:00
Speaker
And working through all these judgments, these habits you've created over is not going to be a simple matter of instantaneous change. It's going to be a matter of building any other kind of skill, starting as a novice and proving to advance levels and continuing to fail along every step of the way. Yeah, so I think that's great.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is where we've created that I didn't think of. I mean, that Olympic example is here, right? So this idea of craft or skill.
00:26:36
Speaker
Like when you're working on becoming a better person, you know, imagine becoming great at guitar without ever messing up a chord or something like this, right? It makes no sense. It's like you're not, if you, if you think you're not going to fail, you're conceptualizing what you're doing incorrectly. So there's these things that we shouldn't care about, right? Like things that are totally outside of our control, but then even the things that are up to us and in our control, they're still crafts.
Contemplating Failure as a Stoic Practice
00:27:00
Speaker
Right. It's still an art that we develop over time. And what it means to be in our control is it means it's the kind of thing that is up to us to cultivate, not the kind of thing that we can be perfectly good at. And this is what you were saying, Caleb. It's like, we still have to, when we say like our character is up to us, that's not like I can snap my fingers and be perfect. It's that it's up to me to change that character and develop that skill. And anytime you're undertaking that craft, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. Totally.
00:27:29
Speaker
So that's what I had as strategy number one. So recognize that failure is a necessary part of trying. It happens when we put theory into practice. So to not fail is to not practice. It's not to actually enter. It's not to compete in the Olympics. It's the abstain from the Olympics because you're afraid and that's not, there's no merit in that.
00:27:50
Speaker
The second strategy is I would say more of a preemptive one. And so this is to contemplate the fact that you may fail before you undertake any task or venture and only undertake the task if you accept this. So this is a kind of premeditatio malorum or premeditation of evils.
00:28:09
Speaker
And it's not to, it doesn't actually limit the chance of failure at all. What it is to do is it's to say to introduce the inevitability or at least the potential of failure into your mind so that when it happens, it's not, doesn't come as a surprise.
00:28:25
Speaker
And in Epictetus, this might be my favorite Epictetus quote, and again an Olympic metaphor here because he makes this strong analogy between the craft of sport and character development. Epictetus says, in each action that you undertake, consider what comes before and what follows after and only then proceed to the action itself.
00:28:46
Speaker
I want to win an Olympic victory. Well, consider what comes before and what follows after, and only then if there's any advantage in it for you, actually set to work. You must accept the discipline, submit to a diet, abstain from eating cakes. That's always a funny line. No cakes for you. And then when it comes time for the contest, sometimes dislocate your wrist or sprain your ankle, and then sometimes get defeated even after all of that.
00:29:11
Speaker
When you've reflected about these things, go on then to become an athlete if you still want to. Otherwise recognize your behaving as children do. And I just, I just, I love that point, which is this idea of if you're finding failure is such a surprise.
00:29:29
Speaker
You've probably not contemplated the kind of thing you're doing, right? So we said, I said, I said before, it's kind of this retrospect, recognize that failure is a part of trying. That's the kind of thing you tell yourself afterwards. This is the kind of thing you tell yourself beforehand, which is to say, look, before I'm going to undertake any venture, whether that's self-improvement, whether that is relationship, a career, an artistic venture, you know, any sort of, any sort of long-term pursuit.
00:29:59
Speaker
I could do all of this and still fail. And just recognizing that and kind of building that into your conception of the thing itself and only undertaking it if you've accepted that. Because if you haven't accepted that, you're behaving like a child. And I see this means that he's kind of a short person sometimes, but children, they pretend to be gladiators, they pretend to be athletes, but they don't accept any of the consequences of that.
00:30:22
Speaker
And I always think that's a quote I go back to time and time again, which is, you know, only undertake this venture if you've considered the fact that it might not succeed and you've accepted that and you're okay with that. Yeah, it has some epithetuses, admirable directness. You know, you also have this line, if you would be a reader, read. If you would be a writer, write. And I think part of what he's calling his students to do here is
00:30:49
Speaker
If you're thinking about achieving an Olympic victory, bring to mind what's directly required to achieve that particular diet, particular training program, and also bring to mind the
00:31:07
Speaker
possibility that even if you do everything right you're going to face extremely difficult obstacles and of course perhaps fail as well. I think it's so easy to pretend that we want something or pretend to go after something without taking this direct route. So I think that's always evidence. Like if you can think of some direct
00:31:32
Speaker
route or rather I should say, if you have in mind some goal and you don't get it, there's that Rudyard Kipling line that just shows that you weren't willing to pay the price or perhaps you didn't want it to begin with. And that's worth clarifying that upfront. Are you willing to pay the price? Are you willing to face the
00:31:59
Speaker
potential or really the necessity of failure. If so, you know, go ahead. If no, you know, why continue on in Epictetus's word behaving as children's do. Yeah. And then there's, there's very few things that if you set as your
00:32:20
Speaker
I mean, I, this is a bit like that. There's very few things you can't have a strong amount of success in. If you said as like your absolute goal, right. And that's not to say, you know, I couldn't be Michael Jordan, but I could be a very, very good basketball player, or I could be a very, very good basketball coach. There's a lot of kind of flexibility when you set that as your primary goal. So if you find yourself not succeeding, that's an interesting question to ask is like, is like, what?
00:32:49
Speaker
degree of prioritization is this given, or did you want maybe what this symbolizes, but you didn't accept the entirety of what it was, which was a large degree of sacrifice and effort, for example.
00:33:02
Speaker
And I just, this is, this is something that I try to do whenever this piece of advice is something I try to do whenever I undertake something is I say, well, you know, would I still want to do it if it didn't work out? Would I still, or am I okay with the fact that it won't work out as a possibility? Is it worth the risk?
00:33:21
Speaker
And that's a really a test that I try to make things go through and that helps me. It doesn't shield me from failure because I can still fail, but it shields me from this kind of emotional turmoil or the kind of being unprepared for that failure because you're, you've, you've, you know, you've looked it in the face, so to speak.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, and if I think about mistakes I've made in the past, I just haven't asked that question as clearly. And in some cases, I think it wouldn't be worth it for me if I failed.
Turning Setbacks into Growth Opportunities
00:33:49
Speaker
And then the question is, well, am I going to ensure this doesn't fail or am I going to, you know, only devote 60% of my resources to it or something of that nature? And in some...
00:34:00
Speaker
ventures, I think it would have been rational for me, a better decision for me would have been just to not take on the project to begin with because I knew I didn't want to go above 60% and I think on reflection should have known that the chances of success were just not high enough.
00:34:17
Speaker
Yeah, for me, it's the cakes. That's the issue. Whenever I consider anything, I go, well, you can't eat the cakes. And I go, oh, I'm done. That's, I'm checking out the Olympic gold for me. This team cake over here. Great. So first two, again, recognize that failure is a necessary part of trying. It's putting theory into practice. So that's something that you can think after you failed, but before you undertake something, you know, consider the fact that.
00:34:45
Speaker
failure as a potential and only undertake that goal, undertake that project if you accept that. The third strategy that Epictetus recommends is what I put as recognize that failure gives you an opportunity to practice, develop, and identify weaknesses.
00:35:02
Speaker
So this is the kind of obstacles away mentality, but it's one that you can come at from different angles. And this is a quote from Epictetus. What advantage does a wrestler gain from his training partner? The greatest. And that man too, who insults me becomes my training partner.
00:35:19
Speaker
He trains me in patience, in abstaining from anger, in remaining gentle. You disagree, and yet the man who seizes me by the neck, and gets my hips and shoulders into shape, renders me some advantage. And yet you say that if someone trains me in abstaining from anger, he brings me no benefit. My neighbor is a bad man? Well, bad to himself, but good to me.
00:35:40
Speaker
And this is obviously not failure. This is like somebody being a jerk, you know, somebody does your neighbor being very annoying mowing the lawn at seven in the morning on weekends or something like this. But the point remains, right? The point is one of, there is an advantage to pull from every situation if
00:36:00
Speaker
The goal is an internal goal. I think that's the important part, right? If your goal is an external goal, some things just aren't advantageous for it, right? Like if you're, sometimes things have just gone worse, right? But if your goal is an internal goal, that development of that character, anything that happens, you can repurpose for the benefit of that. And there's a couple of things here. One is there's practice.
00:36:26
Speaker
Right. So, oh, well, I tried and I failed, but I, but I learned, I practiced. Uh, another is identification of personal weaknesses. So why did I fail? What mistake did I make? You know, if the neighbor is, if my neighbor is making me upset and I failed to remain calm, you know, while there's a weakness there that I've identified and I've added to the list of things to work on.
00:36:49
Speaker
And so I love this idea of, you know, my neighbor's a bad man, bad to himself, but good to me. And that kind of repurposing for that internal goal. And it's not a cop out. I think that's important. Like there's this thing we say in jitsu of you either win or you learn. And I think part of that's good, but part of that I find frustrating because it's like, you should care that you lost because you get the best feedback.
00:37:18
Speaker
when you actually tried, and you actually try when you care if you lost, right? So you should care if your neighbor makes you angry. It's not like, whoop, I'm good for me. I've just learned how to be angry. You should care. That's a failure. That's a problem. That's something you want to work on. But there is that benefit to it. There is that learning aspect. So there is that way to constantly repurpose it. I guess the point I'm saying is the repurposing only works if it's genuine repurposing.
00:37:46
Speaker
If it's just the little thing you say to yourself so you feel better by yourself, that's not really repurposing. That's just telling the story so it stings less. Do you know what I mean? Right, right. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I think you, so another way to word this exact same line is that you whatever occurs in the external world as evidence and just as, you know, evidence about
00:38:11
Speaker
your behavior, about your talents, about your current strategy, whatever it is, and don't overlay it with some additional story, you know, I failed, therefore I am a bad jiu-jitsu competitor, therefore I'm a, you know, ultimately these stories end up in a place where you identify as a failure. I try to be a good jiu-jitsu competitor, I'm not, therefore I'm a failure, or what have you.
00:38:39
Speaker
Yeah. But instead see as evidence for whatever project you're engaged in, you know, maybe it's evidence that you haven't perfected this one technique, evidence that you ought to be training this way more often or deciding what that is, is an often easier task if you can do that with that sort of objective judgment instead of either feeling the need to
00:39:07
Speaker
you know, deny that you fail or even say, you know, it is what it is, which is almost a way of, of committing the mistake of taking the failure too seriously. It's just, and not thinking of it as evidence for something or another. Yeah, I love that. This idea of why I failed. So what was the mistake that happened? What can I change? What's in my control? Again, coming back to that dichotomy of control.
00:39:34
Speaker
as opposed to I failed so I'm this kind of person this means this about me this means this about what other people think of me and these kind of stories that are both unhelpful and then again also not necessarily even true and so that's a great point so that repurposing that's that's the strategy number three
00:39:53
Speaker
Recognize that failure gives an opportunity to practice or identify your weaknesses. It's a way to gain information and it's a way to practice putting that information into practice.
Stoic Happiness and Indifference
00:40:06
Speaker
The fourth strategy, the last one, which is not something Epictetus talks about, but I think is something that I hear of mine as an intermediate practice, an intermediate stoic.
00:40:14
Speaker
I see intermediate, like, you know, I'm just certainly don't consider myself anywhere near a Sage or anything like that. Which is the, to recognize that when we fail, it's often to get, we fail to get something we prefer, a preferred indifferent, not something we need. Right. So it's, it's a failure because we didn't win that game. We didn't get that job. We didn't impress that man or the, or woman. That's well, that's the failure.
00:40:41
Speaker
But these are all failures in terms of pursuing preferred indifference. And that again, I think that again, it's just it's just a way of coming back to that dichotomy of control and doing that, doing that as kind of a sense check for when you start to get disappointed. It's just saying, look, like.
00:41:01
Speaker
Was this project one of character or was this project one outside of my control? If it was one outside of my control, I don't need it to be happy. Just remembering that. I don't need it to have a good life.
00:41:14
Speaker
And B, I probably should have done that second strategy we talked about, which I probably should have accepted before I went after this thing that it was going to be outside of my control. So just that constant reminder, that's something I like to pull in as that last strategy. So when we fail, there are types of failures that involve, again, our personality, our character. But a lot of the times when we fail, it's in these external pursuits. It's for these pursuits of preferred indifference.
00:41:43
Speaker
as preferred indifference, they're things that we should try to get, but they're things that we want to try to get without being disappointed or crushed when we fail to do so. So just reminding ourselves in that moment, this is the kind of thing I'm supposed to care about, but not care about so much that it really affects my happiness. That's when I started to lean a bit too far into these things. Yeah, maybe we could say more about impacting my happiness. What does that look like on the Stoic picture?
00:42:12
Speaker
Yeah. Well, so, so, I mean, this is something that Epictetus talks about. Okay. A little bit technical in the psychology here. Epictetus talks about desire and aversion, which are the, these strong psychological impulses you feel when you recognize something as good or bad. And so, you know, if I think, I don't know, you think maybe your, your.
00:42:35
Speaker
starving or you need water in the middle of the desert, you're going to feel a really strong pull towards that water. That's an example of desire. Maybe a tiger jumps out at you and you're willing to push your friend in front of it to get away. That's an example of aversion, these really, really strong sensations you experience. The Stoics think that you should only feel these things towards being a good person or being a bad person.
00:43:01
Speaker
When we talk about other things like money, success, fame, fortune, all these things, these external things we should feel the kind of a gentler impulse towards. So yeah, if there's, if there's, if all things being equal, yeah, I'll take the job that gives more money.
00:43:18
Speaker
all things being equal yeah i'll take the the fancier car or i'll eat the nicer food but i don't need those to be happy and again happiness is in their sense is is not a
00:43:34
Speaker
I mean, it is a subjective feeling, but it's not just a subjective feeling. It includes a subjective feeling of not suffering and of feeling good, but it also includes this idea of kind of living in accordance with your nature, actualizing your purpose as a human, which is one to, you know, be the most virtuous person you can be, not to be the richest person. You could be your person with the nicest car or the person with the biggest house.
00:44:01
Speaker
So, if you have the biggest house and your house burns down, well, it's not necessarily a bad thing that you pursued that, but it hasn't impacted your happiness. It's impacted the size of your house. And what impacts your happiness is when you make that categorization mistake.
00:44:19
Speaker
And you think, wow, that external failure has ruined my life. It's ironically that judgment, right? That moment, that actual mistaken thought that actually does ruin your life is then the pain and suffering and the sadness that comes from thinking my life is ruined. That's ruining your life. Not the actual, you know, the actual kind of external problem, so to speak. So that's, that's, that's what I meant.
00:44:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's useful to tease that out. So now we're, I suppose we're in the free for all section of our discussion. I'm curious what you think about the following line. Dealing with failure is easy. Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle. You solve the wrong problem. Work hard to improve. What's the second part of that? You solved the wrong problem? That means that if you succeeded, you weren't trying hard enough?
00:45:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's a little bit blunt, but you solve the wrong problem means not that you weren't trying enough, but you probably set your sights on something too easy.
00:45:29
Speaker
I think the thing with that quote, I don't know who it's by. So if you give me some gotcha, it's by a person. Epictetus said it. Gotcha. Yeah, exactly. That's Epictetus's lost, his lost manuscript. I have it right here. The thing, so my thought on that quote is, I don't know, I think it's doing a bit of tomfoolery because, you know, Oh, if you failed to try harder, if you succeed, try harder. Why try harder?
00:45:57
Speaker
You've got to try harder because you want something, and as soon as you want something, you make yourself vulnerable. Stoicism is nice because it gives you very little vulnerability because it centers that want on personal development, this kind of growth mindset, but you're still vulnerable.
00:46:20
Speaker
And I guess there's a kind of try harder in terms of like, live in the present, constantly look to the future. And there's some merit to that, but we're just people.
Personal Experiences with Failure and Growth
00:46:30
Speaker
Like, I don't think it's easy. Like I'm going to, I'm going to always be kind of self-reflective and, and self-judgmental. I certainly don't think it's easy to, to, to just live in the moment and say, well, that didn't work. I'm going to try harder or that did work. Now I'm going to try harder. That's my initial thought.
00:46:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's always fun to run different quotes against each other, you know, so different popular quotes. This is by a computer scientist, Alan Perlis. But, you know, there's a line, success is easy to handle, you solve the wrong problem. You can oppose that with from the art of war, you know, decent generals win difficult battles.
00:47:10
Speaker
the best general only wins easy battles. No. It's like an argument of aphorisms, right? Where if you're a good general, you're only choosing the problems that you know are easy to solve. I think there's something to that. I mean, this is just
00:47:30
Speaker
I think there's something to that, but I mean, I guess I'm just going to come at that from a stoic perspective and there's something to that in an external and we're talking about the external world, right? But in the internal world, you know, becoming a great person is, is that's a hard battle. It's a difficult battle. And that's the alt, that's the battle that matters to win. And you know, maybe I can pick and choose my fights out there on the battlefield, but you're always wrestling with yourself. You can't pick and choose that fight, you know?
00:47:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's right. I think the the what I like about the purless line is that the Very the orientation where if you think you've lost your bearing you can always reorient back to Work hard to improve and then what does that mean in whatever circumstance you find yourself in? You know, that's the next next step but it's not
00:48:25
Speaker
failure means the end of my project and it's not success means the end of my project or what ultimately matters.
00:48:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair. I mean, I like the framing of success not being the end of the project. I think that's really nice. Yeah, we could almost do another discussion on success really and the stoic strategies for dealing with. Suffering from success? Yeah, suffering from success or the fear of success. But look, we wanted to chat a little bit about personal stories. So if you have time to do that, we can do that now otherwise. Yeah, let's do that.
00:49:04
Speaker
I mean, I wanted to talk a bit about personal stories to like flush some examples out. We just had our last episode we talked about, or I mean, the episode that just came out before we filmed this. We talked about grad school and our experiences in that. And I think of that as a failure for me, because I think of that as to provide a bit of context. I did my PhD in philosophy. I wanted to be a professor. I wanted to do academia.
00:49:29
Speaker
I had the job market during COVID. So COVID was particularly bad for the job market, but I applied to everything. I applied to every job in the English speaking world that I would reasonably want to be in, even in places where I was like, I hope I don't get that job because I don't know if I want to live there. And I didn't, I didn't get.
00:49:46
Speaker
I didn't get interviews. I didn't succeed. Right. I just, I just failed at the job market and you know, there's caveats. The job market is notoriously difficult to succeed in. I think COVID was a bad year. Many people take many years. There's all these different caveats to it, but it was just this moment where I had to kind of wrestle with the idea of not being good enough in that, in that moment. And it was the first time in my life, I think, where I wanted something. Oh, first time in my life, but it was, it was a.
00:50:15
Speaker
It was a long-term project that I set myself on towards becoming a professor that I could not continue along that project in the traditional way. I would have to substantially pivot and it would have to look very, very different. And that's kind of, that was a, so that entire, that viewed me,
00:50:33
Speaker
not just failure like I wanted to be at a great school and end up at a good school or something like this failure like I'm not gonna end up at any school and what does that look like and what stoicism was really nice for was not shrinking away from this or being like it doesn't matter but just recontextualizing the question on myself right and so first of all I should say that was really hard for me I had like a real existential crisis but then stoicism was helpful in the sense of being like well you know
00:51:02
Speaker
Who I am is not this resume or this CV that's getting rejected. Who I am is this person. And then it's like, who has interests and makes decisions and choices. And what is this person interested in doing? And does that match on to academia or is there something else I could get elsewhere?
00:51:21
Speaker
And Stoa is a great example of that. When I thought about it, I thought, well, what I really like to do is I really like to do kind of public philosophy. I really like to help explain concepts to people who are still learning rather than pushing human knowledge forward. And there's ways to do that that don't involve academia. And there's ways to do that that really complement other types of lives. And Stoa, this podcast, for example, is great.
00:51:50
Speaker
thrilled to get to do this. And this is something that I only got to do, or really, I would say, focused on because I failed in that other direction. And that freed up the time and the energy to commit myself to this. So in a way, I don't want to just frame it as just like, the story isn't just about good news. It worked out in the end. The story is about, I think I was able to pivot and navigate through that situation effectively.
00:52:18
Speaker
even though it was really hard because I was able to kind of do that stoic perspective of going back onto character and what are your inclinations? What are your, what are my talents? What are my interests? And if I, if I frame it on that way, instead of constantly framing it on, well, what's the external circumstance that I'm looking for by, by shifting into that perspective, I was able to pivot.
00:52:45
Speaker
And I don't know, that's that I think is an example of something. I think I raised that example too, because that's an example of a time that I failed where I was already a stoic and I already kind of had these like tool to this toolkit and I was able to apply it, you know, not perfectly, but it was able to really help me navigate through that situation. Yeah. What do you think of that? Well, I think that's a.
00:53:11
Speaker
Great example of a project you seriously invested yourself in and didn't see it come to fruition. Of course, there's a sense in which I'm sure you're much happier doing philosophy the way you are now, but given what you are aiming for to begin with, that must have been, I think, caused a serious seismic shift in how you think about how you do philosophy, what you were setting out to do, and so on.
00:53:42
Speaker
Yeah, it sucked. So this sucks, but yeah, exactly that, right? You kind of put five years of your life, a lot of time towards this direction and then it just doesn't pan out, right? So you say, well, I'm going to do this thing. And in exchange, this other thing's going to happen and then that doesn't happen. Right. And so, but, but very grateful to kind of have these lessons that I said today.
00:54:04
Speaker
You know, this idea to practice or identify my own weaknesses. This, this recognition that I didn't really contemplate the fact that I might fail. I didn't really accept that. Or I did do a certain extent, but I didn't really internalize it. You know, so a lot of these tools came in handy or were good reminders in that situation. Yep.
Reframing Failure and Rejection
00:54:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think so.
00:54:26
Speaker
Well, some of the examples I have are in software engineering, getting rejected from jobs. Software engineering interviews can be relatively concrete. You're asked to solve particular problems on a whiteboard. And sometimes you'll do interviews, you'll do great on all the problems, and you just won't get the job. And other times you'll know that, oh man, I just didn't do as well as I could have on those, the problems that they gave me.
00:54:55
Speaker
And that's always difficult to do or I shouldn't say it's it's difficult, but that's always just a fact you need to manage and I think I have
00:55:05
Speaker
a folder now of job rejections, rejections of people from people who refuse to do stoa conversations or join partnerships with stoa just in my email inbox. And I think just like collecting them all and looking back on them sometimes is, I suppose it's, you know, if I look at these strategies,
00:55:29
Speaker
you have up here a reminder that failure is just an aspect of the project of whether it's software engineering trying to build out STOA and that since that projection was received in 2020, I've improved in all these other ways and there's some amount of
00:55:54
Speaker
I suppose I have some amount of, take some amount of joy in the fact that I can collect all these things together and then reduce their occurrence, of course, over time. But, well, maybe not even reduce, but reduce the, it makes it reminds me, I think I suppose, having some difficulty putting this into words, but I guess it reminds me that I am still trying, I'm still trying to improve still training and provides an extra bit of motivation.
00:56:24
Speaker
Yeah, I've seen this other thing, somebody posted this like a failure resume, I don't know if you've seen this before, where it was like a list of all the universities they got rejected from, all the scholarships they got rejected from, and the person was actively, it sounds like you're doing the same thing, right?
00:56:39
Speaker
actively keeping track of those in a way of kind of taking back ownership of them. And I've heard this before of this, this goal of like, sometimes in academia, I mean, these are all very academic examples I'm giving, but this idea of, I don't agree with this because I think this is overcompensation, but I think there's something we can learn from this because it's about hitting the right middle ground. This idea of trying to get as many journal rejections as possible in a year as the goal, instead of acceptances.
00:57:05
Speaker
And if you accept journal rejections, you will have a lot of papers getting submitted to very high level journals. And if you do that, you're probably going to end up doing better than if you didn't have any rejections, right? So that I think is an overcompensation because I think the point you made, which is like failure should be information.
00:57:23
Speaker
So if you treat failure like a badge of honor, you're just like repurposing it for another emotional state. You're not treating it like information. Like it should be information, but I think people could benefit from actually swinging so far. Some people are so failure averse. They could benefit from swinging so far the other way and saying like, no, it's going to be, it's going to be a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. I love that you keep track of that and reflect on that.
00:57:49
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with what you just said that trying to get as many rejections as possible is too indirect, right? It might be closer than what people might do by default. But, you know, if you go back to that Epitetus line about thinking through what's actually required to become an Olympic victor, well, just to transfer that into the academic context was actually required to publish excellent articles.
00:58:17
Speaker
The optimal strategy, the best strategy is probably not the same thing that lines up with maximize journal rejections. Just do whatever maximizes your chances of getting a publication in a legitimate journal. Totally. Anyway, that's the way to think about it, I think. All right. Awesome. Thanks for putting this together. Yeah, cool. Fun to chat about and fun to put it together.
00:58:45
Speaker
I think we hit on some important things.
Summary and Closing Remarks
00:58:47
Speaker
I felt like my understanding was improving even over the course of our conversation, where there's this, this, this balance between trying too much and trying too little and you know, you want to care enough that failure is an option.
00:59:00
Speaker
But, and you want to be pushing yourself hard enough that you can fail, but you want to also be resilient to those failures, both, but not ignoring them because you can pick up information from them. It's this really, it's this really intense balancing act. But to summarize the stoic position, I think first.
00:59:20
Speaker
You can avoid a lot of your failures if you practice the dichotomy of control, because if you stop caring about a lot of things external to you, you'll stop having a lot of what you feel are failures. A lot of those failures will just go away for the ones that remain either because they're internal or the things you care about.
00:59:36
Speaker
Even though they're external, they're the things you decided to care about. Again, those four lessons is recognize that failure is a necessary part of trying to be good or trying to do something. It happens when we put theory into practice, so to fail is not try. Second is to contemplate the fact that you may fail before you undertake any task and only undertake the task after you accept this, so recognize this beforehand. Third, recognize that failure gives you an opportunity to practice, develop, and identify your weaknesses. That's that information point.
01:00:05
Speaker
And fourth, just as a stoic, remind yourself that, you know, often when we fail, it's when we don't get something we prefer, not something we need. So this sting to that should naturally be a bit less. That's it. Yeah, that's, that's, that's my take. Excellent. Awesome. Useful summary. Well, I think we can call it there. Great.
01:00:27
Speaker
Thanks for listening to StoA Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to get two meditations from me on Stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we found for practicing stoicism, check out stoaletcher.com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
01:00:57
Speaker
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01:01:19
Speaker
And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.