Running towards “the suck”
The most subtle kind of failure is the one that hides behind competence. You’re doing well enough to be seen as good, but not enough to feel the stretch. You’re failing to fail.
Real growth begins where feedback starts to hurt. Progress demands discomfort, but our reptile brain is wired to avoid it. We often choose fluency over friction, familiarity over feedback, comfort over clarity; and in doing so, we stop evolving.
I was reminded of this viscerally through tennis. When I first took up the sport three years ago, my improvement rate was steep. Every week, a new shot landed, a new motion clicked. But then the curve flattened abruptly. I could rally cleanly in training but collapsed in matches. All the training, straight out the window; it just would not translate in action. Instead, it translated to a few broken rackets.
That phase lasted years. Painful, repetitive, unrewarding, and often downright revolting. Similarly with windsurfing, I have thought of quitting many a times; “why do I always pick sports that produce more frustration than they do joy?” I would type into GPT.
The only thing that kept me going, besides a genuine love for act of playing, was a quiet belief that something underneath was rewiring; that if I only endured “the suck” for a little longer, I would eventually climb into the next level of the learning curve. And so instead of playing tentative in matches to hold my own and scrape a W by, I decided to suck some more instead.
And one random Tuesday afternoon, it happened. Somewhere along the line, the patterns had inverted. Instead of scrambling to think of what to do next, I started flowing. Time dilated, my form maintained, and the points started racking up. The system finally integrated.
That’s when I think I started climbing the slope of enlightenment.
The same mechanics apply to work, to relationships, to self-development. The only sustainable path to getting good enough, then getting good, then becoming great, is learning to get over failure faster than it accumulates; standing your ground as it tries to beat you into submission.
The moment you stop failing, you’ve stopped learning. And that’s the real failure.