Failure

Speaking broadly, there are two ways to think about life: passively or actively. Passive philosophy amounts to letting things happen, whereas active is about making things happen. I generally try to stay active. If I want something to happen, I need to make it happen. Sitting around waiting for something to happen or for someone to come along and tell you what to do is passive.

Survivorship bias often gets discussed as a cautionary tale. For example, someone might point out a person’s or company’s success, and another will retort with, “But that’s just survivorship bias!”. People don’t often discuss how to internalize survivorship bias in an actionable way. In other words: if you know that most people who win the lottery in some fashion (whether in business, investing, dating, or even the actual lottery) did so mainly out of luck, it doesn’t answer the question of how we can use this information to our advantage.

I’ve long held the belief that it’s better to try and fail, than to never even attempt doing something. Along with a few successes in life, I have had a very long list of failures to my name. Here’s a story about one such failure. Christening Ursula, my canoe I was at a social gathering a few days ago and I had a conversation with someone about how I’d tried to paddle a canoe down the Mississippi in 2017.