Failure Is The Way To Knowledge
How to reframe failure and use it to grow and become better
We know that inflation is coming. So in order to best prepare for it, who would you turn to for financial advice for a calmer and safer financial future?
Would you turn to:
Person A, who has a lot of theoretical knowledge and shines with explanations of problems and solutions on social networks?
Person B, who has a lot of knowledge, is financially doing very well and has tons of successful investment stories?
Or Person C, who is now in a good financial position and doing well despite going bankrupt years ago?
Nowadays, we are attracted mainly to the first two models. Maybe it’s beacuse of the capitalist society, which glorifies success, or because of social networks and the media, which paints us an ideal portrait.
We make decisions, buy products and services based on success, charisma and the emotions people trigger in us. What we don’t know is what’s behind the scenes.
We do not know that Person A, despite his deep financial knowledge and charisma, is deep into credits and loans. We don’t see that Person B, despite all the money and wealth, is lonely, unhappy and dissatisfied with life in general. And we don’t realize that person C, despite not having such charm and being less wealthy, is much happier and satisfied with life than both.
Maybe the cause and reason for his happiness and satisfaction with life is the fall, defeat or failure that he/she experienced through bankruptcy. Bankruptcy gave Person C something that the other two persons don’t possess: the experience and knowledge of what it’s like to fail, how to pick yourself up and win again.
I would venture to say that Person C has something more to offer: knowledge, experience and values that cannot be learned or bought — the experience and knowledge of what it’s like to fall, what it’s like to be at the bottom, how to put yourself back together and then get back up again.
In today’s time and age, due to the fast and “short attention span” kind of society, the information overload, in the world of experts where almost every others person is some kind of “expert” and “consultant”, and the absence of deep personal knowledge and life experiences, such knowledge and experience that person C has is something invaluable.
“Gnowing”: The Real Kind of Knowledge
The ancient Greeks had two words for knowledge and knowing: eídein and gnosis. The first word was used for intellectual knowledge, while the second signified knowledge gained through experience.
Some languages have preserved this distinction to this day:
Italian distinguishes between sapere and in conoscere,
French distinguishes between savoir and connaître,
Spanish distinguishes between saber and conocer,
German distinguishes between wissen and kennen.
With the first words, we describe and communicate intellectual knowledge and understanding, and with the others the knowledge we have accumulated through personal experiences.
The English doesn’t have that distinction, but we could call this personal knowledge “Gnowing”.
It is precisely because of this deep personal knowledge that the most compassionate are those who have gone through severe emotional hardships, the most motivated and driven are those who have recovered from a serious injury or illness, and the happiest are those who have been unhappy for a long time.
And we come to this deep personal knowledge through experience — most often through failure and defeat.
Failure is the way to grow
Failure is the way to grow and become better — although sometimes it’s so f*cking hard to come to this realization and use failure to our advantage instead of using it against ourselves — to feel grateful and that I’d happened for us, instead of feeling guilty and ashamed that we failed.
I’ve never been good at this… I’ve always taken failure as something personal — I’ve usually felt like I didn’t succeed, that I’m a failure, that nothing will ever become of me, I’ll never become nobody and that I’m never going to succeed.
It’s the same with my burnout experience: I carry a lot of guilt and shame inside of me from my experience with burnout.
It started when I first burned out, then as I was improving my condition it got a bit better, but now the last half a year as I’m struggling, it got worse once again.
I feel guilty and ashamed that I burned out in the first place. I feel guilty and ashamed that I had multiple burnout episodes since then and that I should have known better. I feel guilty and ashamed that I still struggle with it even though I study the topic, write and teach about it.
But I should embrace the failures and feel grateful for them: because each failure has taught me so much that I probably wouldn’t have learned if it wouldn’t have happened.
In each failure I gained experiences that will serve me in my life and mission.
How to reframe failure and use it to grow and become better
Reframing is not easy and it doesn’t happen overnight.
I am working hard to make the mental shift to no longer see defeat as a failure, but as a source of important personal experiences and deep knowledge that I will be able to use in my life and share with others.
The way I see it and the way I try to approach this is In order to transform the idea of failure and use it for our growth, is to work on two things:
1. To pick ourselves up and recover from failure and start working towards our goal again
2. Focusing on the mind and making a mental shift is our thinking that failure is something that happened for us so that we can become better, stronger and wiser.
Remain student of life, take nothing personally and never stop learning!