Fail Better Soon

The Buddha compared wisdom to a royal cook. In his day, kings didn’t have “meal plans”. The royal cook had to observe which dishes the king pushed away, and make sure not to serve those again. Not failing wasn’t an option. Recovering from failure was what counted.

So much of modern society, however, exists to help us hide from failure. Like Adam and Eve, who ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and then thought they could hide from God, we think our arguments and algorithms will free us from having to make mistakes.

But as we try to hide from failure, three terrible things happen:

We lose our sensitivity to the truth. People who develop elaborate mechanisms for avoiding criticism ultimately lose touch with their inner guidance. This is why so many spiritual traditions warn about the dangers of over-intellectualization.

We lose our authentic voice. ChatGPT, for example, doesn’t actually improve your writing. It flattens it, removing anything objectionable, thereby destroying your true self-expression. This is both a danger of AI and a metaphor for how we often lose ourselves in the shortcuts.

We lose our ability to receive help. People bemoan the loss of community, but community doesn’t fall from the sky. It comes from allowing ourselves to seen in our need and in the truth that we fall short alone.

There’s a famous quote by Samuel Beckett: “Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” But how do you fail better? It starts with how you see your purpose on earth: not to get it right, but to return to wonder. That’s a practice. You have to practice seeing the deeper meaning in the error, the fertilizer in the bullshit, God in every catastrophe.

Image by Bill Mayer