When you never succeed you don’t know the difference.

to a typical person failure is the best teacher. it shows you what you did wrong and you figure out why it didn’t work.

there’s a quote supposedly by Thomas Edison that’s fitting for your question.

I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.

point is, you never truly fail as long as you learned something.

however, people with high anxiety may not feel the same way because they’re too focused on results over experience. to them my best advice is this; get medicated. I say this as a medicated anxious person. if that’s not possible for you, learning from your failures will take more effort.

it helped me to write my failures out, one sheet of paper only. discuss the points with myself as if I was talking to a person on the sheet of paper. discuss what I did wrong and next steps to resolve the problem. once I was done, I burned the paper. While burning it I envisioned all the failure burning with it along with all the stress and anxiety. this gave me control over the failure and the outcome of the failure and allowed me to take the next steps to resolve it as I had discussed on the paper.

failure should be a good thing in a way. It allows for understanding and growth. No one understands anything from just having the right answer. Much like the phrase life is a journey, understanding is a search. In searching for a right answer you really learn to understand the topic. This is why even if ai was perfect with its answers it really bad to use it unnecessarily. This is high level though. you will learn things by repition. its called rote learning. It tends to be siloed and isolated. You can memorize the capitals of the 50 states but that won’t tell you why a place became the capital and you can even memorize a blurb about why wor when but again its all kinda siloed and you really did not get an understanding around it.

Kinda lost my train of thought but the problem is with a society where failure results in not being able to live a good life. that trumpin sucks. and I found my new target word.

You rarely succeed without failure.

Failure is a chance to learn. Why did you fail? How could you improve? How could you fix the problem even after failing? How could you ensure you don’t fail again?

These are all things you typically can’t learn until you fail and have to answer these questions.

I fail at things everyday. But because I’ve failed so many times with so many things I know how to fix things or how to set myself up so failure isn’t possible.

If you twist yourself into knots due to “failure” you essentially break the learning mechanism in your head.

Often this is due to shit parenting where your parent teaches you ideas of what success and failure are that don’t align with the real world. They burden your immature mind with fear, pain, and guilt, usually for trivial failures. Usually because they have their own baggage they never examined.

But some people accidentally do it to themselves, too, even if their parents didn’t go hogwild on the shame, guilt, and punishment game if they “failed” something.

Anyway … learning from experiences is a human superpower. When you get all freaked out about failure you basically cut out of yourself the mechanism humans use to be smarter than animals. Because you stop putting yourself in any positions where you might be challenged. You close your eyes to experiences where you might learn because you got too conditioned to fear feeling bad things if you “fail”. So you start to lose access to the rewards of trying, failing, and LEARNING from that failure in a way no book can teach you. The fear or failure gets in the way of your ability to learn, and that’s awful.

Learn from your failures, don’t lobotomize yourself with fear and guilt (as if failure is an express pass straight to hell that will damn you forever or something.)

And if you don’t know how to chill out with yourself yet, learning how to chill, maybe with therapy, or maybe by doing a lot of introspection, should be your number one priority. Life gets so much easier once you can roll with the punches instead of carrying a millstone of fear on your back every waking moment.

(Why yes, I have strong feelings about how having a fucked up mindset about failing can cripple one’s ability to learn…why do you ask? Lol)

Most of the time I really enjoy being alive, beyond that there is no failure.

Eliminate all the shit that drags you down. This is what I did

• Cut my shitty toxic family out of my life.
• Cut all shitty toxic people out of my personal life, doing that for your professional life is much harder.
• Stopped smoking pot and taking other intoxicants daily.
• Stopped eating bad food and sStarted exercising regularly; this really helped my sleep schedule.
• Quit smoking cigarettes… holy fuck that habit drags you down.

I read a book for a bit and pet my cat.

If you’re not failing, you’re never learning. If you succeeded at everything in life, why would you need to learn anything? Learning things is what makes us human. And thumbs.

I don’t. I can’t even do that right!

I failed college at 22-ish. At fist I denounced all academics and got my trucking license. I got married and had two kids, but the academic failure kept on itching me. Tried to go back to school for years, but it was difficult financially and time management wise. Eventually got my Bachelor at 35 and am now working as a junior swe.

I stay informed of current events, wherein I am constantly reminded that the world is absolutely chalk full of far, far greater failures than anything I’ve ever fucked up, or am even capable of fucking up.

by learning from it and trying a different tack

You don’t. Distracting yourself from the emotional experience is how you develop supressed emotions that will keep cropping up for years to come. Instead of trying to distract yourself from these emotions, when they crop up, just take a moment to notice how it feels, and accept it. First be courageous to feel your difficult emotions, then be willing to feel them completely. As you sit with your feelings, they will tend to dissipate over the course of a few seconds or minutes. Then later, the feeling will come back, and you may again feel an aversion to feeling it. And then, again, you can sit with it. Note that there is no pressure to “do it right” any time you feel these emotions since, after all, the emotions will just keep coming back until you have fully processed them.

You note in another comment that you don’t know how to embrace something that hurts you. But it isn’t complicated. Pain and discomfort are just feelings, and we can accept them with equanimity. It just takes practice.

I don’t. I embrace it, learn from it, beat myself up for it and try to do better.