Glamorizing failure and perseverance

Champions don’t lose, they run out of time, I heard my daughter’s tennis coach and mentor say.

There are hundreds of other quotes and stories on the topic of perseverance and the benefits of failing.

Of course, where there is a de-facto failure, it helps to find comfort in knowing that others failed too and then recovered and succeeded; it helps to receive words of encouragement from your mentors and family.

Still, I often think that the concepts of failure and perseverance are glamorized and rationalized in a misleading way. Some post-failure success stories are great but they are not as profound as we might think. We are programmed to survive and move on, so we do, most of the time; the statistical odds of eventually finding success are probably not bad; and sometimes the other way around — you just keep on failing, without ever seeing the light of day.

Do you see stories about someone failing miserably, failing multiple times, and … just continuing to fail, never succeeding? No, you don’t. These stories are many but they are not told, not documented, because they are not interesting, to say the least; they are dark. It’s like with start-ups: for every unicorn and the (probably) fascinating journey behind its success, there are thousands of tombstones in the graveyard of failed start-ups; and that’s a metaphor; such a graveyard doesn’t even exist. Own or other people’s money is irreversibly lost, one’s family suffers, people are fired — then nothing, absolutely nothing…