Fail fast. Fail forward. Fail better. As a society, we’ve turned failure into a slogan to celebrate, but somehow we’re more afraid of it than ever.

So what’s going on? Most of us say failure is our best teacher, but I doubt many of you have ever walked away from a failure doing a happy dance. IInstead, you probably let the moment rattle around in your head at some ungodly hour, then played it a little safer the next time. Don’t worry, you’re not the only one.

Today, Drew and I break down why every piece of advice you’ve ever received about failure has, well… failed you.

We cover why indulging in “failure porn” is such a harmful move and what it actually takes to learn from our mistakes (it’s not what you think). We explain the evolutionary reason a rejected email can feel threatening. We tell the story of how a country’s inability to admit failure got thousands killed, and of a monk so tormented by his failures that he confessed them for six hours a day. We dive into the three different kinds of failure and why the setback itself matters less than the actions you take after. And we even discuss when quitting is and isn’t a failure, and the five-question test that reveals the difference.

Apologies in advance: this episode will not teach you how to avoid failure. On a long enough timeline, the failure rate of everything is 100%. So let’s get really great at failing.

Get your free episode guide: https://mrk.mn/failureguide

CHAPTERS

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction: The Failure to Understand Failure
• 00:01:15 Chapter 1: The Most Overdone Topic in Self-Help
• 00:07:39 The Failure Porn Industrial Complex
• 00:16:06 Why Failure Worship Made Everything Worse
• 00:41:47 Chapter 2: Why Failure Hurts So Much
• 01:02:35 The Sociometer Theory: Your Brain’s Status-Tracking System
• 01:14:28 The Ego, Original Sin, and Why You Can’t Escape Failure
• 01:31:57 Chapter 3: When You Define Yourself, You Define Your Failures
• 02:07:08 Confession, Therapy, and the Technology of Atonement
• 02:23:48 Chapter 4: Andre Agassi and the Two Types of Failure
• 02:30:00 Guilt vs. Shame: Converting Your Pain Into Growth
• 03:04:36 Chapter 5: Amy Edmondson and the Three Types of Failures
• 03:19:46 The Science of Learning From Failure: Dosage, Recovery, and Extraction
• 03:30:37 When to Quit: The Five Questions That Reveal If You’re Being Smart or Just Scared
• 03:38:53 Closing Thoughts: Choosing Your Failures Wisely

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