The Failure Fallacy

smokecheck1976 · 2016-05-30T03:57:12+00:00

"The more you sweat in practice, the less you bleed in battle."

An old US Army saying has it's roots here, and I wouldn't be surprised to know something similar exists in the world's other professional armies.

Failures happen. Not one of us, no matter how fortunate the circumstance of our birth, is going to live a life free from failure. The point is to keep that failure to a point that you can learn and grow from it. Failures in a low detriment environment, like practice, offer the chance to review the circumstances and how your choices led to your failure. This is healthy failure, as healthy as it is going to get.

A large failure can be catastrophic, but as long as you think strategically, you can probably mitigate and endure a major loss. IF you lose your job, but you have been saving and strategically investing your money, you may feel pinched but be okay until you get the next job. Investing in situations that aren't worth it can produce bad results.

Look at it this way, you want to meet girls, but you are bad at it or have no experience. The part where PUA advises having something like a few scenarios ready to go just to give you something to talk about is a good idea. However, you should analyze what engaged a particular woman and what did not. Not all women (circumstances) are the same by a long shot, but what generally works on one might be useful to know when talking to another.

Most of us here are going to seek a long term relationship at some point. If you think in terms of protecting your assets and being prepared when that sweet little girl that would never do anything to you turns into the psycho bitch from hell you will be okay. If you comingle all of your accounts because "you lub her!" then you are setting yourself up for a disaster.

long-lostfriend · 2016-05-30T16:43:47+00:00

Yes, it's something you can learn from, but it's something that we should work towards avoiding at all costs.

There are things worse than failure. Like being too much of a pussy to make an attempt at something because you are avoiding failure at all costs. Hell, why even approach another woman ever again? After all, you may fail.

Unfortunately, modern culture doesn't stress one simple fact of life: you don't always get a second chance at things.

And that means that you do something else. Often that something else ends up being something better.

Yeah, certain types of failure should be avoided as much as one is able. But not all failure falls into the category of being catastrophic.

The common idea is that you learn more about something through failure than through victory, but is this just a fallacy designed to make people who fail at things feel better about said failure?

Not at all. For example, how many people found the Red Pill as a result of a failed relationship? I can state without the slightest bit of hesitation that had my life not been turned upside down by failure, I would likely still be the BP "Nice Guy" that I was 10 years ago.

Dude, your post reads like a whole bunch of blustering bravado. No one actively "shoots for" failure, but avoiding it at all costs makes one a coward.

ContreToutChacal · 2016-05-30T01:38:36+00:00

Yea it's the kind of simplistic feel-good advice that originates from 'motivational' writera. It is easy to see why it gets widespread because of its simplicity and vagueness (instead of a nuanced advice to deal with uncertainty and risk, just label the bad outcome good and preach!). Same as the 'strong beautiful woman' and 'looks don't matter in pickup' memes. Dumbed down feel-good messages just spread faster. Although, this kind of messages are not all bad. It is necessary to get one started in whatever endeavor they are pussying from. However, I prefer the more-straightforward and truer 'you will die anyway'.

But no failure is not always good and this way of thinking should be discarded in favor of more nuanced strategies as soon as one gets moving.

Professional failure can irrevocably damage your career.

Sentimental failure can damage your reputation.

Vasallo7G · 2016-05-30T16:27:45+00:00

I disagree.

One of the best bussiness stories I have read is about a millionare that offered a prize to the man who can fly with a mechanical device more than a mile (or something like that) anyway years went by and nobody could claim the prize, until a dude showed up and took a different approch, he found a way to build something he could test almost daily, in other words he failed everyday, meanwhile the others took months or years to execute a single try. The dude won the prize after a few months failing.

You also can see this in kids in baseball when they bat. The ones that are not afraid of missing are the ones that learn to hit sooner/better.

AlphaEndoGorillaKing · 2016-05-30T03:33:59+00:00

The truth exists within the paradox. Let's look at failure from a bigger, more abstract perspective. Success and failure don't exist solely in the specific competitions and clear cut challenges that we can see at face value, the fight exists in every moment of our lives, and it is against ourselves. Yes there are some situations where failure is literally fatal, but I believe that what happens at that moment is a build up of all the actions that led up to that point. Failure is painful, and if you are going to attempt something great in my opinion you need to realize that there will likely be many failures occurring. P.S. I don't know of a single super successful guy who hasn't failed multiple times in his life.

jaggedlittleredpill · 2016-05-30T16:16:36+00:00

Upvoted, but I'll have to disagree. Most people who succeed only do so after a long string of failures.

Avoiding failure and 'mediocrity' only leads to perfectionism, which can be dangerous to one's self esteem and motivation whenever things don't work out.

Avoiding failure can also encourage risk avoidance. And we all know that success rarely comes without risk.

I say that we shouldn't strive for failure, but we should accept its possibility and eventuality along the path to success.

Entropy-7 · 2016-05-30T02:13:54+00:00

You have to be careful about balancing this attitude against being outcome independent. If you are outcome independent then failure IS an option because it doesn't matter in the context of your larger goals. On the other hand, you will get guys who fail and then posture like they are OI: ZFG/DNGAF, look at me, I'm so alpha.

favours_of_the_moon · 2016-05-30T02:19:49+00:00

The common idea is that you learn more about something through failure than through victory, but is this just a fallacy designed to make people who fail at things feel better about said failure? Failure teaches us what NOT to do; end of story, and it's nothing that we should ever shoot for unless we're experimenting with something in order to get a big (guaranteed) payoff later on. Failure is NOT your friend.

The thing about failure is that is it valuable not to be afraid to TRY. Many people are afraid to try something because they FEAR failure. It IS important to overcome that anxiety.

It's also important to learn how to win.

NicCageForPresident · 2016-05-31T02:45:40+00:00

Most guys lean waaay closer to "too much fear of failure" than "too little fear of failure".

What exactly are we supposed to take from the post?

Don't fail on purpose? Yeah, got it.

NonExplicit · 2016-05-31T09:10:23+00:00

The trick is to fail fast, while the consequences are small, so you can move on to something viable.

Death doesn't really fit into that model.

thundercat_011 · 2016-05-30T07:42:31+00:00

Your thinking is faulty in applying things in too broad a context. Life's variables aren't so simple as to have universal premises apply to everything. There's people who have never worked in their lives and did not need to apply themselves because they got lucky and won the lottery or married a rich guy (in the case of women). That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to apply yourself, read books, self-improve, start your own business, etc. because you're most likely not going to win the mega-millions.

It seems as though modern culture promotes failure as this thing that is a requirement for eventual super-success, and that each failure you make brings the promise of getting exactly what you want out of an endeavor or out of life.

I disagree. That stuff doesn't exist outside of Tony Robinns' books. No one takes it seriously and many use it as a crutch to explain away why they never did anything in life. In reality most people are very much afraid to fail and get hurt. This is the basic emotional state of SJWs and modern people in general. Real life is scary.

Also your examples are really iffy. Risk/failure in actual warfare is entirely different from risks in approaching women or starting a business. Even though people may make metaphysical comparisons between the two ("life is war! har har"), it's not the same thing. Obviously, the correct answer is don't sign up to be a meat shield if you don't have to. Enlisting for combat is already total failure in the first place. Doctors also have malpractice insurance to mitigate a lot of the failure. Lots of people die in hospitals due to medical negligence, much more than you think. Failing to make a good decision on the battlefield or killing someone in the hospital isn't the same as failing at your office job, getting that cute girl, or going red in your business.

Failure is NOT your friend.

No one actually wants to fail. But you and me and everyone else will fail some capacity. It's inevitable. Most likely it will be failure in little things and a few bigger things. We can definitely learn from them. I think your problem is misunderstanding failure and total, disastrous life-changing failure. That's why you read, try, and self-improve slowly so you will understand things other do not.

If not, what is the fucking point of reading any material on this sub or even being here? An example of retarded total failure would be dumping your life savings in opening a bar, especially since those kind of businesses have abysmal success rates and the people who do it have no working bar experience at all. Anyone who does that is very very retarded. Instead start a side business while you work a job, so that it can slowly grow to something lucrative in time. And if that fails, it's not a problem, because you didn't dump your fucking life savings into it.

Basically it's all about tolerable risk/failure management by using knowledge. You can learn from those failures. Don't go to war, don't join ISIS, don't get married, don't dump your life savings on something stupid, don't take $100K in student loans, and especially don't climb mount Everest. Do approach women, learn new skills, get a better job, start a business, lift, etc. If the don'ts aren't obvious to you, you still have a lot to learn.

NietzscheExplosion · 2016-05-30T17:08:38+00:00

This is the era of no slavery, bankruptcy and ideas.

Literally you can try and try and try and try and as long as you are successful even once, you win.

Just don't get student loans or voluntarily join armed forces (by oath - key). I can tell you no university is worth shit these days and no country is worth dying (or killing) for.

Title	The Failure Fallacy
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	25
Comments	18
Date	May 30, 2016 1:20 AM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/TheRedPill
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/4ln8df/the_failure_fallacy/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/TheRedPill/the-failure-fallacy.59517 https://theredarchive.com/post/59517

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