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Mistakes Are Necessary for Success
Mistakes Are Necessary for Success
Mistakes, difficulties, obstacles, the resistance of this world are an integral and precious part of the process of life.
Some people may see resistance and obstacles as a sign that this is not their path. I do not. I do not really ask myself why obstacles arise; I treat them as a natural fact. More than that, as the years pass, I try to be grateful that obstacles appear at all.
Any valuable gifts, everything we have achieved — all of it has come and still comes through resistance, through overcoming difficulties. If something came easily, you would never value it.
This idea has been celebrated by hundreds of poets and philosophers.
Attraction to what runs away from us.
I do not know, maybe this is something purely male... but the more impregnable the fortress, the harder it is to take, the sweeter the victory afterward. Competitions, sport, wars, girls — everywhere victory is valued more when it was hard-won. Apparently, this will never completely change in us.
I value difficulty. I am a fan of overcoming 😀🤟.
It is like training. Think about it: what is the point of lifting a dumbbell from the floor again and again... 100,000 times, for decades, lifting the same thing upward over and over — is that not difficulty, is that not overcoming? And yet I enjoy it. From a rational point of view, there is nothing particularly logical about lifting pieces of iron that gravity keeps pinned to the floor, making no lasting change at all: you lift them and put them back... and repeat this for ten years. What is the point?
To overcome yourself — your laziness, your fatigue. A constant disturbance of homeostasis: bang, bang, the body struggles, recovers, supercompensates; over time all its systems adapt, and psychologically an orientation toward overcoming is formed. And then — we studied this — it transfers to other spheres of life. Here:
Overcoming external resistance through muscular effort becomes established in a person engaged in athletic training as rational behavior that helped them achieve a goal in the context of training. The resulting orientation toward overcoming becomes a model for all their other ways of responding to the world.
An orientation toward overcoming, as a specific direction of consciousness, is extrapolated to all other spheres of life.
Another thought:
🎩 If the education system, with its whole tiered hierarchy, is supposed to develop a person, then why should one long-past stage of development serve as a barrier and a prohibition? Why freeze it in place? What is education for, if not to change a person, educate them, and support their growth? Do we not believe that personality can change?
Looking at these photographs, I have the feeling that the photo on the left is now a part of me — embedded, mounted inside something larger and more diverse, which is shown on the right.
It was a mistake! A miss. But that is exactly what made it possible to learn the lesson... We learn from our mistakes, and mistakes that cause unbearable pain also create values and principles. In my case, this led me to humanistic psychology (see the next post).
Some children need the Avengers and Hello Kitty,
Other children need the service “Sober Parent”.
And I keep composing and writing as though I were Khayyam,
For me, giving up psychology would be haram!
★★★★★ 5/5
Questions about this article
01Why can mistakes be a necessary part of the path to success?
A mistake reveals the limits of a previous way of acting and provides material for learning. When a person draws a lesson, changes their behaviour, and continues to act, failure becomes part of development rather than final proof of incapacity.
02Does every obstacle mean that the chosen path is wrong?
No. The text treats resistance as a natural part of meaningful activity. An obstacle does not prove that a path is right either, but it calls for assessing the situation, adapting, and deciding whether to continue the effort.
03How is physical training related to an orientation toward overcoming?
Using athletic training as an example, the author describes a repeated cycle of load, recovery, and adaptation. In his research interpretation, a learned way of dealing with external resistance can transfer to other areas of life.