“The more mistakes and failure you can handle without loss of self-esteem, the faster you can grow, and the grander and more expansive your growth experiences can be.” [Beating Yourself Up – Steve Pavlina] goo.gl/mxF7GT

The problem with English and every other language I have been exposed to is that it has (they have) only one word for failure. At least as far as I’m aware. Now, some languages have multiple ways of knowing (French: savoir versus connaître), many words for snow (this has occasionally been subject to dispute but the current consensus appears to be that it’s correct), and many words for relatives, but they all seem to have only one word for failure. ¹

And this is a problem. We have the same problem with “love” in English. The love you have for your siblings is not the same as the kind you have for your pets, romantic partners, spouse, parents, gadgets or limbs. But we just call it “love”; all of that difference and distinction collapsed into one word.

The same is true of failure. We use one word, but in reality, there are, broadly speaking, at least three types of failure. And they are very different.

• Success ²: Showing up and taking shots and making shots
• Shallow failure: showing up and missing shots
• Deep failure: (showing up but) not taking shots
• Total failure: not showing up at all

Now, obviously, success is not a type of failure. But I put it in there to illustrate just how unreasonable we’re being in expecting everything, every attempt, to be a success in the traditional sense. After all,

• What do you think the probability of showing up, taking a shot and making a shot is?
• What do you think the probability of showing up, taking shots and making every single one of them really is?
• And what possessed you to think that the probability of any of these happening should be higher than the probability of simply showing up and taking a shot? Remember, conjunctive probabilities are always lower ³.
• So, from a purely logical, mathematical standpoint, we cannot, should not, must not expect to be batting 1.000. ⁴
• But if you think you’re “better” than Babe Ruth (or any other man in the arena ⁵) because you’re not a professional baseball player so your record is “unsullied” by failure, then you’re so wrong, you’re wronger than wrong.
  • And if you think you’re cooler than the guy who got curved by that stranger because you shut up and said nothing (“better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”, right? wrong!), then you are, again, wronger than wrong, sadder than sad, uncooler than uncool. That guy has racked up XP (experience points) in the game of life. But your pride is intact, right? Well, that and 500 yen will get you a tall steamed milk at Starbucks. おめでとう. Congratulations.
  • All learning — all success — is nothing but continuous improvement. And improvement is just a trade. What do you trade? Time? Money? No. The real price of learning is dignity. You risk (and often experience) looking and feeling like a schmuck. And the only insurance policy you have to protect you is unconditional self-love. But what you get in return? Puh-riceless.

Anyway, back to failure.

Shallow failure is the kind we want. Deep failure and its sibling total failure are the kind we do not want. The messed up thing is, you’ve probably been conditioned to think and (more importantly) feel the same about shallow failure as about deep failure and total failure. But you shouldn’t, because that would be like loving your siblings the same way you love your romantic partners. Which, like, yeah, don’t be incestuous, dawg. Leave that kind of thing to the Game of Thrones people.

SRSing turns shallow failure into success through repetition and moulding intervals to suit your needs. Timeboxing, meanwhile, is a way to systematically (and, again, repeatedly) turn deep or total failure into shallow failure.

This is not to slam strategic thinking. Indeed, as Sun Tzu taught us two and half millennia ago ⁶, the best way to win the war is without fighting. The best way to win Internet arguments is to not get into them in the first place #quagmire. The best way to get good at output is to focus 100% on input — yes, you can build output skills without output practice, just like you can bake a cake without using cakes (lol). Sometimes, in some cases, the best way to win is not to play at all (or to play on a different field). Strategic thinking is still valuable but strategy should not turn into an excuse for total failure.

But how do you know if you’re thinking strategically or just deluding yourself? Well, the short answer is that you often can’t tell — self-delusion is very powerful. The long(er) answer is, you can help yourself find out by doing experiments — taking very small time- and/or quantity-limited little bets. Think of it as gambling with pennies — shallow failure is cheap by its very nature.

But don’t just believe me. Believe these guys:

• “A common mistake for personal growth newbies is to wrap one’s self-esteem into short-term results. This often leads to self-blame and excess worry when results are below expectations.
  If we use the lenses of truth, love, and power (our fundamental growth principles), we can see why beating yourself up for mistakes and failure is an ineffective approach that doesn’t actually help you grow.”
  [Beating Yourself Up – Steve Pavlina] goo.gl/mxF7GT
• “The real cost of rejection isn’t hearing 「no」 that one time. It’s missing opportunities to try again because the original rejection is still echoing in your head.” [Aim To Fail: Why Rethinking Rejection Can Increase Productivity] goo.gl/wceCVN
• “I’ve got a painter friend who paints one painting every single day. He believes that it’s impossible to paint 350 crap paintings in a row. So if he paints every day SOMETHING will be a success.” [Aim to Fail] goo.gl/f9ZzQa
• “…there’s one crucial area we neglect when it comes to goal-setting: We don’t set goals for failure.” [You Should Aim To Fail A Minimum Of Once A Week | Thought Catalog] goo.gl/xkyxAr
  • “What if we started looking at failure itself as a win? What if, instead of measuring the chances that worked out, we measured our successes by the number of chances we opted to take? By the number of times we put ourselves out there, the number of goals that we gunned for, the number of attempts we made to learn or take a chance on something new – even if it didn’t work out.” [You Should Aim To Fail A Minimum Of Once A Week | Thought Catalog] goo.gl/xkyxAr

Some companies in Japan have been implementing these lessons for years now. In the late aughts, one Japanese company (a pet food manufacturer) stopped giving its salespeople monthly sales quotas and instead gave them monthly visit quotas. Instead of tracking sales (in dollars/yen) it tracked attempts at sales. It redefined success. Result? More sales. More attempts, more dollars.

If thing A causes thing B, if A is necessary for B to exist, then A is more important than B and we should focus on A. Breathing matters more than fashion. Electricity matters more than, I dunno, font shape. You get the idea.

And so this brings us to a new, better, non-traditional, non-intellectually-lazy definition of success:

• Success: Number of attempts made.
  • Corollary: So-called shallow failure counts as success.
• Failure: Deep or total failure.
  • Note: failing every attempt is not total failure.