Show Notes
Fail fast. Fail forward. Fail better. As a society, we’ve turned failure into a slogan to celebrate, but somehow we’re more afraid of it than ever.
So what's going on? Most of us say failure is our best teacher, but I doubt many of you have ever walked away from a failure doing a happy dance. IInstead, you probably let the moment rattle around in your head at some ungodly hour, then played it a little safer the next time. Don't worry, you're not the only one.
Today, Drew and I break down why every piece of advice you've ever received about failure has, well… failed you.
We cover why indulging in "failure porn" is such a harmful move and what it actually takes to learn from our mistakes (it's not what you think). We explain the evolutionary reason a rejected email can feel threatening. We tell the story of how a country's inability to admit failure got thousands killed, and of a monk so tormented by his failures that he confessed them for six hours a day. We dive into the three different kinds of failure and why the setback itself matters less than the actions you take after. And we even discuss when quitting is and isn't a failure, and the five-question test that reveals the difference.
Apologies in advance: this episode will not teach you how to avoid failure. On a long enough timeline, the failure rate of everything is 100%. So let's get really great at failing.
Get your free episode guide: https://mrk.mn/failureguide
CHAPTERS
Chapters
- Introduction: The Failure to Understand Failure
- Chapter 1: The Most Overdone Topic in Self-Help
- The Failure Porn Industrial Complex
- Why Failure Worship Made Everything Worse
- Chapter 2: Why Failure Hurts So Much
- The Sociometer Theory: Your Brain's Status-Tracking System
- The Ego, Original Sin, and Why You Can't Escape Failure
- Chapter 3: When You Define Yourself, You Define Your Failures
- Confession, Therapy, and the Technology of Atonement
- Chapter 4: Andre Agassi and the Two Types of Failure
- Guilt vs. Shame: Converting Your Pain Into Growth
- Chapter 5: Amy Edmondson and the Three Types of Failures
- The Science of Learning From Failure: Dosage, Recovery, and Extraction
- When to Quit: The Five Questions That Reveal If You're Being Smart or Just Scared
- Closing Thoughts: Choosing Your Failures Wisely
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