Why Failure Hurts More Than It Should

0:02[music] So, the modern research on why failure and loss hurt so much begins in 1969 in Israel. At Hebrew University, Daniel Kahneman is a new professor, and he invites Amos Tversky to give a guest lecture to his psychology students. And at the time, Tversky is a bit of a celebrity academic in Israel. He's considered a genius. Uh he was a very famous paratrooper in one of the recent wars. Uh he's generally beloved by everybody. And he gets up in front of Kahneman's class, and he starts lecturing about how people's guesses are

0:41actually often statistically accurate. That if you ask somebody to estimate like a large number across a population, that people's intuitions are surprisingly good at this. Now, Kahneman is watching him lecture about this, and he is thinking to himself, "This is total bullshit." Because Kahneman was also a veteran, but he had worked in the psychological unit. So, he had watched as IDF analysts had made confident predictions, created statistical models, come up with all sorts of plans, and been horribly wrong about every single one of them. He had actually seen the opposite, that people's intuitions were absolutely terrible at predicting the future. So, he politely lets Tversky finish his

1:25lecture, and all the students leave, and he walks up to him afterwards, and in classic Israeli fashion, he's like, "I think you're wrong. [laughter] This is This is a bunch of bullshit." And the two begin arguing about it. And as they're arguing, finally, they just kind of look at each other and agree. They're like, "Well, then, let's study it and figure this out." So, they plan to do some experiments together, and thus began probably the most fruitful research partnership in the history of the psychological field. Uh they would go on to publish dozens and dozens of studies. They would revolutionize not just the the the field of

2:01of psychology but also behavioral economics. They would win a Nobel Prize. Their influence in how we understand human thinking and human decision-making really can't be overstated. Now, their method was really interesting, which is that they would kind of just sit around together and they would spitball hypothetical situations to each other, like little thought experiments. And the reason they did this was to test each other's intuition. So, they would ask each other things like, "Let's say 600 people have a terminal illness and you have enough money to finance one

2:35of two medical programs. The first medical program is guaranteed to save 200 of the 600 people, but you're going to lose 400 of them. But the second medical program, you have a 1/3 chance of saving all 600, but a 2/3 chance of all 600 dying. Which one would you choose?" Um I'd probably go with the guaranteed 200

2:56Yeah. Yeah. I probably would, too. Yeah. Yeah. It just instinctively feels right. better for some reason. Right. And they noticed this pretty much universally. Like almost everybody picks the first medical program, even though mathematically they have the exact same Okay, right. risk profile. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's funny thing little things like this, right? Like where it's like statistically both options are the same, but we all intuitively are feel pretty strongly about the first program. So, they had another little fun thought experiment where they would present students with a situation where you could flip a coin and if it came up heads, you would make a thousand dollars, but if it came up

3:34tails, you would lose a thousand dollars. Sure enough, pretty much all the students turned this down. But what was really interesting is they changed the offer. So, you flip a coin, if it lands heads, you get $1,050, even if it it's tails, you only lose a thousand dollars. Right? So, the expected value is actually positive. If you had infinite money, you should flip that coin as many times as you possibly can. Interestingly, pretty much all the students still turned down the opportunity to flip the coin. So, time after time after time, they started to notice a pattern, which was that people tend to weigh losing something more than they value gaining

4:15something. They even did another little thought experiment with this is that they they took one group of people and they put a coffee mug in front of them and they said, "How much How much would you pay for this coffee mug on average?" And let's say the people said five bucks. Then they would take another group of people and they would give them the coffee mug and say, "How much would you sell this for?" And people wanted to sell it for more than they were willing to buy it for, right? They valued losing the thing more than they valued gaining it in the first place. And this

4:42was really driven home for them because in 1973, Israel was invaded by all of its Arab neighbors, uh and they were called into active duty in what today is known as the Yom Kippur War. And what was interesting is that both of them, as they were riding off to the front, when they started looking at all of the intelligence failures and the military failures that happened leading up to that war, they kept seeing the same pattern. Intelligence agencies that didn't want to risk losing too much, so they papered over evidence of an impending invasion with different narratives or different stories. People who looked away from potential catastrophe because the loss

5:26of being wrong about it would have been so catastrophic for their career or, you know, for for whatever, their platoon or their agency or whatever. Now, this phenomenon eventually would become known as loss aversion and Kahneman and Tversky's big contribution was that they found pretty consistently the ratio of how people weighted loss versus gain of the same thing was roughly two to one. That people generally experience the loss of something as twice as bad as the benefit of gaining the same thing. And if anybody who's been competitive in sports or uh tried to win at anything, like everybody knows that the pain of losing is significantly

6:08more severe than the joy of winning. And it lasts much longer. Now, they eventually kind of bundled up a lot of their experiments and they they broadly called it prospect theory. Uh and they would go on to win a Nobel Prize for it in 2002. Unfortunately, Tversky did not survive that long, but Kahneman has always insisted that the work was theirs together. Um and has always given him credit for all of the work that they've done

6:33together. But, it raises a really interesting question, which is that if loss aversion is very much just baked into our psychology, it seems to be hardwired in all of us, why is it there? What are the circumstances in which we evolved that loss aversion would make sense in nature? It's kind of cruel, Right. Right. And as we're going to find out

6:53that you can't train yourself out of it. You can't convince yourself. Like, being aware of this does not change the fact that it that it exists inside of your brain. It's pretty much a fundamental aspect of of how we perceive risk and loss in our lives. So, then the question is why? Why, Drew Berrymore?

7:11Tell me why. It's very cruel, like I said, right? It seems like a very cruel thing of the universe, I guess, to deliver us this like pain hurts so much more than than gaining something, you know? Something good is not as equal as something that is equally bad. Like, we're just we experience pain so much more vividly and acutely than we do of gaining something,

7:30right? Why is that? If we look at if we kind of step back a little bit, there's this really interesting study done on capuchin mon- monkeys, okay? You know, these capuchins are like the little they think of the like little grinder, you know, like those little monkeys. You with the little cymbals. Yeah, with the little cymbals. Yeah,

7:46yeah, yeah. I like I like it. Right. Yeah, they're cute little monkeys. But, um they're smart, too. But, we diverge from them about like 40 million years ago. We like a common ancestor. We haven't had one of those for a very, very long time. But, you can train them to operate in an somewhat of an economy, right? This this one researcher, Keith Cheneys from Yale back in the uh 2000s, he trained these capuchins to basically trade aluminum coins that he made for apples and

8:12fruits like that, right? Yeah. And they figured it out pretty quick. They They They showed them that they could There was market fluctuations. Like some some days apples would cost this much or this much and the the capuchins would participate in this economy, okay? So they They were smart enough to even do that. What they found out too is they they kind of set up this experiment where you could test loss

8:32aversion. So they had one of the experimenters go and they would offer him one apple. Every now and then they would give him two apples for the same coin, for the same aluminum coin. And monkeys figured this out, okay, fine. So you got another researcher that would come in and would show them present them two apples,

8:48but would sometimes take one apple away. But on average they were always getting the same number, like 1.4 apples or something like that on average, right? For every time that they would give them one of these coins. Even those monkeys though at that point, they preferred the first person who would guarantee them one and

9:05sometimes give them an extra one. Yeah. They didn't like the one who would give them two and then sometimes take one away. Right. So even in that context, like these this this monkey that we haven't shared an ancestor with for 40 million years has loss aversion. They would rather take that that sure gain rather than have something that would be taken away from

9:24them, okay? It is about 71% of the trades, about 70% of the trades shook out like that. And they've actually shown this in other primate species too. Once you get closer to this too, so chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, they all show this what they call endowment effect, which is basically what you're talking about it is when you have something, you would prefer to hang on to it rather than trade it for something else even even if that other thing might be a little bit more valuable, you're going to take the sure bet more more likely cuz you don't

9:53want to experience that loss. Yeah. Okay? So this it seems to be very very ancient hardware that we have like in the mammalian brain. And in fact it is what they the the neuroscientific studies that they've done on this have found very ancient parts of our brain that are involved with this. Uh, very deep mammalian structures. They It kind

10:13of splits into these like two systems. You have a a system that evaluates subjective value of whatever it is in the environment that you're hanging on to. Um, and then the systems associated with like negative emotions. And both of these fire up whenever we're experiencing a loss like this. And so it's and then it's very ancient, these very ancient brain systems that are in like all mammals. So it seems to be very very hardwired into us. Now,

10:38the question you asked though was, why? Why would it be that way? And if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, right? Most of our uh, history as a species has kind of we've been living on the edge of survival, right? We're on the margin of survival. On that margin, if you get a windfall of some resource, food or whatever it is, that's kind of nice. It's going to get you through another month or two maybe

11:02at the most. If you lose something in that same environment though, you could be dead next week. There's an asymmetry going on there. Right. If you lose something, you're dead. If you gain something, uh, You live a little longer. You live a little bit longer. Yeah. So there's there's an asymmetry there where uh, the loss is much more significant for in terms of your

11:21survival than a gain would be in that. Uh, Kahneman and Tversky figured out is that that's about a two to one ratio. Yeah. And so that's why uh, you would have this bias towards uh, wanting to hang on to things and not lose them, right? The problem comes in is that we're using this ancient evolutionary hardware on modern problems that don't have those same types of

11:42consequences, right? Right. So like if you're going to lose 50 bucks or something like that, that's going to be the like uh, emotionally the same as gaining $100. The valence there is is completely skewed. When that doesn't really have a whole lot of bearing on your life now. Or like you're looking at your quarterly reports for at your job or something like that. And if you see the loss on there, you're registering a loss in your brain using that ancient hardware and that ancient software going on. And it's registering as, oh, this is a threat to my survival when it's really not. Um so that that's the theory the evolutionary

12:15mismatch theory anyway is that we're applying these in all these wrong ways. I think it's exacerbated by the fact that you could probably answer to that in modern life. The gain of something is worth more than the loss of the thing, right? Like if if you just think about money, right? Like the more money you make, the easier it is to make more. That's pretty well established. Like financial wealth compounds in all sorts of different ways. Whereas like losing money, I mean sure you can go broke, but like you can't really I mean you can go

12:45into debt. You can declare bankruptcy. You can kind of start over. I would argue that the asymmetry today is actually the other way. I feel like probably people who are who are very intelligent risk-takers, financial risk-takers, whether it's traders, finance people, entrepreneurs, um even executives uh at at large corporations, like they they probably gotten good at fighting against their loss aversion, like leaning against it, um

13:17not listening to it. I Yeah, it's easy to like um do this in terms like business and stuff like that. We also do it in a lot of other areas of our life though, too, right? Like uh a breakup hurts a lot more than like getting into a new relationship feels good, right? Um I think that's a big one. And I think there's a lot of people who like oh I took this for granted and then I lost it and then all of a sudden you feel all this weight coming down on it. That's

13:38loss aversion. Yeah. You know, like you took the relationship for granted or something like that and then once it's gone, then it hurts so much. That that's loss aversion. That also is loss aversion. Or yeah, losing a job, too. Just like you're saying, that's like oh that's probably a good thing in this in these scenarios. You'll find a better job or

13:53there's more jobs out there, right? Yeah, but it still feels worse. more than it is any gain and anybody will tell you this. Anybody who's uh acquired any sort of success will tell you this that the losses hurt more than the gains. The gains are never as good as you think they're going to be.

14:06Yeah. That's baked in. That's hardwired in and we can't get around it. But first, we're going to take a quick break, so don't go anywhere. This episode is brought to you [music] by Shopify. Now, in my time, I've started a few businesses at this point, and every single time there is this point where you go from being excited about your idea to staring all of the logistical

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15:51And we're back. Let's get back into it. Probably the most interesting example of loss aversion that I found was there was a really interesting study done in 2011 on golfers. Great title of a paper. It's called Is Tiger Woods loss averse? [laughter] And basically, these two guys, Pope and Schweitzer, they uh they analyzed 2 and 1/2 million putts on the PGA tour over 400 different pros, uh 239 tournaments. It's actually a really interesting uh way that they set up the study. So, for people who don't play a lot of golf, um there things called birdies, which is kind of the equivalent of like gaining a point, and then there are things called

16:28par, which is not losing a point. You like it it's you're you stay at the same the same number. So, you could view putting for a birdie as putting to gain a point, and you could view putting for par as putting to not lose Not lose. Okay. All right. So, what So, what these researchers did is that they took the exact same golf courses, they took putts of the exact same distance, same exact location, but different players in different circumstances, either birdie putts or

16:55par putts. And they analyzed all millions and millions of putts. They analyzed the distance, location, direction, everything apples to apples. And they found a significant difference in terms of the accuracy of birdie putts versus par putts. So, birdie putts, they go in 83 and 1/2% of the time. Par putts go in 88% of the time.

17:16Which is crazy. Yeah. Like there shouldn't be any difference, right? But it is. you're saying hold on. So, you're saying like let's say it's a birdie putt at 10 ft Yes. and it's a par putt at 10 ft from in in the same direction same spot, same everything. Yes. They're more likely to make the par putt

17:31than the birdie putt. Correct. Okay. Okay. Okay. And the argument, the conclusion is that players are paying a lot more attention. They're much more focused. They take more time. They're much more diligent. They're much more careful with their swing. They're afraid to lose strokes. lose. Okay. So, they So, they put more effort into the par putts than they do the birdie

17:50putts. Interesting. Okay. shows up in the result. Okay. So, they're they're loss averse. They are loss averse. Okay. So, what's interesting is that the the loss aversion it mellowed as the tournament went on. So, like golf tournaments, they go on for 4 days usually. And the further you get into the tournament, you're no longer really playing against the

18:11course, which is what you do on day one. You're playing against the other golfers. By day four, you know how many strokes behind you are of the person in front of you, how many strokes ahead you are of the person behind you. And so, what you see is the loss aversion stop showing up with birdie and par putts, and it starts showing up with their

18:29placement on the scoreboard. Interesting. So, the the the standard changes, the the relevant metric changes, and their behavior changes because of that. Yes. And this is a nice little metaphor of how we're going to approach failure throughout this episode. Loss aversion never changes. What you are loss averse to changes based on your definition of failure. So, when the definition of failure is bogeying on a on a hole of golf, you experience loss aversion there. But, when that definition of loss changes to falling behind the the guy ranked behind you, then that becomes what you become loss

19:05averse to. How interesting. Okay, that's fascinating. Okay, okay, so that's that's all well and good. Uh we don't want to fall behind the leaderboards in golf. Yeah. Uh we want the best treats, you know, we can trade for, all of that. Like, why does it hurt so bad when there really isn't anything being lost?

19:23being lost? Right. Or like there's no physical damage. Like, physical pain makes sense, Right? Yeah. physical damage. And like a golf game, right? Like, you lose a golf game, no nobody died. Right. Like, nobody's going to die, but like people get really upset. Right. Why? Yeah. Why do they do that, right? There's something inside of you that is treating that as some kind of injury of some

19:42sort, obviously. But, but what is that? Like, what is being injured through all out all of this, right? Well, turns out there was this um this researcher in the '90s, Mark Leary, and he came up with this idea of what he calls the sociometer, right? And it's really what it is is it's tracking your status within a social group. So, you know, in our evolutionary past, we grew up in these small groups, and letting someone down, failing something, that actually that had real stakes to it, right? And so, you would lose status uh in that situation if uh you were to fail and fail other people especially in

20:16that situation. And losing status meant you could be left alone, which meant you could die, right? There was like real stakes involved with this. So, it's not this like cold calculation that we're doing either. It's got to hurt. Yeah. It has to hurt for you to be motivated to not want to fail and not want to let other people down like this. Cuz again,

20:35this is what he called the sociometer. It comes back to the fact that like pain at the end of the day is an evolutionary tool. It's a nudge towards behavior that's going to help you survive and replicate or at least helped us survive and replicate for hundreds of thousands of years. And so, in this case, it's like, okay, even if it is an arbitrary game, even if it is just something as simple as like who can carry the biggest rock or whatever in our caveman days, stuff like that mattered because it indicated who was the most reliable, who was going to help the tribe the most, who could save your life when you

21:07needed it, uh who could hunt the biggest game when it came down to it. And then status began began to become attached to that. And so, we have this like internal measurement gauge inside of our head at all time trying to gauge how much status do we have with the group around us. Yeah. And it happens like almost automatically, too. If even if you don't know the people around you, if there's any sense of there's a status thing going on, you latch onto that and you try to figure out exactly where you're sitting within that. There's a really interesting set of studies that was done uh by Leary and others uh too uh that

21:39was they they brought people into the lab and they uh had strangers were assigned to just these meaningless groups. There there wasn't really any meaning to them, but they were told that they would either be included or excluded by the group. Okay, just this people would be like people are either going to accept you or or deny you based on just some arbitrary

21:58criteria, whatever it was. Even that, the people who you never met, okay, these were strangers, people had never met before, you'd never meet again, tasks that you were doing within this group that didn't matter, if you were excluded or included like had a had an effect on how you felt about yourself in that situation. Yeah. Like that's how ingrained it is and you could tell your status from that. If you told them if you told the people that this was just random, like your status is just decided randomly, it didn't matter. But if you said there's other people judging you based on this, people you didn't know, again, would never

22:29interact with again, doing tasks you never that don't mean anything. That's how innate it is. funny. So, have you ever Have you ever like volunteered for a psych study? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, I used to do it in college a lot and uh I would do anything for 10 bucks back then. Exactly. Exactly. And I remember I used to go in and and it was it was always really funny because yeah, they they

22:48just put you in a room of strangers. You've no idea what you're there for. You've no idea what you're going to do. Like they they come in and they ask you to do like some very random thing. And I'm just I'm just thinking back and and imagining like walking into that room with like five or 10 other people and then having the the researcher just look at me and be like, "Who here wants Mark to stay?" And like [laughter] nobody raises their hand. I would be so [ __ ] pissed. I would be like, "Fuck

23:13all you people. [ __ ] you. Who do you think you are?" Right? And it could it could be Who cares what the reason is for, right? Like it's just imagining that happening is is enough to like Yeah. Yeah, I can like imagine the emotion that would come up. Importantly, uh in these studies, too, what they

23:30found is that it's really the exclusion. It's this loss aversion going on again, okay? Because when the same was true when you were like included in the group, they like they found the the people who Yeah, oh yeah, you were accepted into the group and you're good. They felt fine. They're like, "Okay, fine, whatever." It's when you're excluded that the pain really came in, that that was measurable and they got a measurable response from that. That people who just felt worse about themselves. That sociometer really took a hit. Only during the exclusions. It's a threat detection system. It's not a bonus reward system or anything like

24:00that. You don't get to feel good because you get included. You only feel bad because you're excluded. It's it's loss aversion, is what it is. And but it's at the social level. Losing social status is really the measure that that hurts the most. You know what this reminds me of? You didn't go out to many nightclubs, did you, when you were

24:17I was I was not a clubber. Good. Good for you. Good for you. Biggest waste of [ __ ] time and money [laughter] ever. I went to way too many clubs. And in a lot of nightclubs, especially in like like big cities like New York and London. Yeah. Um they have a setup where it's like you have the VIP section, right? Where [clears throat] you have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to basically sit at a table behind a velvet rope uh where it's just as loud and

24:41shitty as the people on the other side. It's completely arbitrary. And it was funny because I remember when I was young and broke and I used to go out to clubs all the time. You know, I would sit there. I'd be like one of the the cattle herd like crammed into the middle of the bar waiting 20

24:56minutes to get a drink. And I would I would look over at the VIP area where you know, they all have their own waitresses and the waitresses are super hot and there's like champagne bottles and sparklers and everything. I'd be like, "Man, it It must be so cool to be in there. Like it'd be so much nicer, so much easier. You could like talk to people. You could meet a bunch of girls." And I used to think that for years in my early 20s. And then I remember once I got a little bit older and I got some money um I went out to a couple clubs and I bought VIP tables for

25:24me and my friends. And I just remember sitting there and being like, "This is it?" So dumb. "This is so [ __ ] stupid. Exactly. I just wasted so much money for nothing. I for nothing." So getting included had almost zero benefit. Zero benefit. Zero benefit. excluded hurt like hell. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly the sociometer's uh uh mechanism there. Yeah. And again, it just comes back to that whole loss aversion thing. Like losing status uh with our evolutionarily ancient brains that we have

25:52Mhm. that signaled literal death at one point in our evolutionary past, right? Yeah. It's just being kind of hijacked now uh in a lot of these situations. That's a perfect example of when it's being hijacked in a way that's uh screwing you over basically. And there's a lot of places that will mess with you, you know, different status games and

26:13um you know, airlines do this, right? With their statuses and points and you know, do you get the premium economy seat or did you get a free upgrade to like the you know, special extra legroom seat, you know, and it's and people love it. It really taps into something extremely primal in us. Yeah. Yeah, it does. Even if it's super

26:31arbitrary like you're saying. Yeah. So yeah, there's another thing to like you've kind of been hinting at. You can't really talk yourself out of this. Yeah. You can't reason your way out. You can't If you even if you know about it, it really doesn't change a whole lot. One of these studies that they did as well was they had participants they would speak into a microphone. And they just talk about themselves. And then they received

26:51feedback from a quote-unquote stranger. It was just the the the researchers basically that either accepted or rejected their stories. Like this was a good story. This wasn't a bad story that you just told about yourself, right? The rejected participants they would dismiss these impressions. They were like whatever. These people I don't care about

27:08Yeah. these people. It doesn't matter. Somebody I don't know. But when they measured their their their sociometer status kind of thing How they felt about themselves? how they felt about themselves later, it actually still went down no matter what. Wow. Even if you had that self-talk like we always say, oh just you know, screw them. They don't know what they're

27:23talking about. the comment section. It's Yeah, the comment section. Dude. It digs at you, doesn't it? I know. It's worth [laughter] It's so funny cuz it's like I know it doesn't matter, but it's like it's still it still just sucks. Yeah. Yeah. And you like good feedback you're like, oh that's that was nice. Yeah, exactly. Like there'll be a

27:40hundreds and hundreds of comments. hang on to that one. Right. And then one person like makes fun of my hair or my shoes or something and I'm like, oh sh [ __ ] you. Joey Baloney 648, right? Right. Yeah. What do you know? Yeah. People that you don't know, will never interact with again, and arbitrary

27:55standards. Yeah. Yep. [ __ ] mammalian brain. Can't get away from it. Yeah. No Well, I exactly. You know, when when somebody rejects us for something completely arbitrary, right? Like and we're not actually losing it, you know, it's like we lose a golf game or we lose you know, uh Joe Blow next to us that can carry a bigger rock or you know, run faster than us. Like why do we feel so bad? Like what is actually being harmed? It was funny cuz when you said that the first thing that came to

28:21my mind was the ego. And it's interesting because if you actually go back to Freud's theory, you know, we've done a whole episode on Ego. on the ego on solved. People can can go back and listen to it. Um the TLDR is that uh Freud's original theory about the ego has just been completely butchered over the years and and people have a very almost like a cartoonish understanding of what what the ego is and the purpose it serves us psychologically. The real understanding of the ego, the Freud's like actual explanation of what the ego is, ties in perfectly with this sociometer theory, right? Like Freud's argument is that we

28:59have two primary incentives in our lives. One is our instinctual urges and just base drives, and then one is the culture and social influence around us, right? We want to satisfy our urges and needs, but we also want people to approve of us, people to to like us, to have social status, to fit in the cultural norms, social norms, to be seen, you know, to be respected and admired and all those

29:27things. And the ego is the self-definition that balances those two things. The ego is It is the the bundle of narratives we tell about ourselves that exist to help us both get our our fundamental needs met and and satisfy our urges, but also do it in a way that doesn't make everybody hate us, doesn't get us kicked out of

29:49the tribe. Yeah, I had I had a psychology professor explain it really well one time, I think. So, where you try there's you have your urges and your your base desires and everything like that, and you have society's expectations on top of you, and then the ego comes in and says, "Wait, I have a plan." [laughter] Like I thought that was a really good

30:05way to to to say what the ego is. it, guys. this, yeah. [laughter] But what's interesting about the ego is that it it is we protect it as if it's part of ourselves, right? Like it and when the ego is threatened or attacked, we feel the same physiological response that we do if our body is threatened or attacked. And so, when we talk about failure, failure of social status, failure of like losing the respect and admiration of others, it very much is a threat to the ego, right? Because it is a threat to our self-understanding of how we feel about ourselves and um and how we see ourselves. And sure

30:42enough, you see this in the research as well. Like people will experience the pain of failure even when they're alone by themselves. Even when nobody's around and nobody can see what happened or what they're doing, right? Like we still, even if you're alone in your room trying to do a thing that you think is important, when you fail at it, you're

30:59going to feel like a loser. And the reason is is because that sociometer it doesn't turn off when you're by yourself. It still exists within you and you are always using it to gauge what your relative social status is to other people. And even when you were doing things by yourself, you were still measuring your ability to do those things against that sociometer of like the standard that you have set for yourself based on the people around you, based on society at large, based on whatever culture you exist within. But first, we're going to take a quick break, so don't This episode is brought to you by AG1. We like to picture

31:37failure as one dramatic [music] moment, the big blowup that detonates in your face. But usually, it's the 20th morning in a row that you meant to get your act together, but didn't. The basics let you slide because nothing was technically on fire. And the shorter the days get, the easier those basics are to drop. October hits and the mornings get darker and I'll deal with it later starts running the show. One basic that I've actually managed to keep is AG1 next gen. One scoop every morning. It's formulated to support steady energy and I've felt that. My digestion's [music] been smoother, too, which tracks since it's clinically shown to enrich the gut

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32:56solved.deals/ag1. All right, we're back. Where were we? Now, there's a word here that we've been dancing around and and I've intentionally wanted to dance around it, and that is self-esteem. Like another way to think about what this internal sociometer is is self-esteem. I mean, one day we'll do an episode on self-esteem. definitely should. And and and we will talk about all of the ways that it it got butchered and mangled over the decades. But it it is I think most people conceptualize self-esteem as something that exists independently and internally on your own, right? Like when people say, "Oh, you just need to have better self-esteem." or like, "Oh,

33:36we just need to improve her self-esteem." It is often said in a way that if you just felt good by yourself on your own then everything would be fine. But the truth is is that self-esteem is intimately connected to how you're seen by others, right? Because ultimately, the way you feel about yourself is a response to how you predict other people are going to feel about you based on what you can do. So, we're tying together a a whole bundle of psychological concepts here, but the point is is that failure hurts regardless of whether you actually lost something or not, whether it's a tangible thing you you you lost or just some abstract

34:20arbitrary measurement that you you failed to live up to. It hurts whether you agree with the people judging you or not. It hurts whether you're even with other people or not. And it hurts whether it even makes sense or not. And like you said, the reason it hurts in all these circumstances is because it identified as a threat prevention system. As a way to protect yourself and to keep you in good graces with the people around you and to keep you competent and living up to expectations that other people set for you and that you set for yourself. We still haven't defined failure yet and a lot of that is

34:57because it doesn't really matter what the definition of failure is. If you lost something, either tangible or abstract, it's going to feel bad, no matter what. You could be [ __ ] Steve Jobs and it's and you wake up, it's going to feel shitty, right? Warren Buffett wakes up, sees he lost a bunch of money, it's going to feel really shitty and it's going to feel worse

35:18than making that same amount of money. It doesn't matter who you are, what situation you're in, how smart you are, how many ways you rationalize the importance of the failure, how many lessons you gain from the failure, it is going to suck always, all the time. It's [snorts] just fascinating. I just I don't know.

35:37It's kind of sick. Yeah, it's cruel. Yeah, it is. cruel. [laughter] Like our our minds are just set up to be kind of cruel to ourselves and then it we we create these egos and then these egos are what is reflecting back on us that we that hurts us, too. Like it's the target of our pain, but it's also our own

35:55creation. And it is the whole purpose of the ego is to be hurt. Right. Right. Because by being hurt, the ego is signaling to us that our livelihood is under threat, right? So, we construct our egos, we create all these narratives about who we are and what we can do and who's going to like us and who's not going to like us, so that all those narratives can fail us and be threatened, so that we can get really upset and anxious and freak out, so that we behave in more adaptable ways

36:24that promote our survival. And I guess there's there's one or two ways you could look at that. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, but that could either be the best realization you have of this whole episode. Yes. Or the worst, [laughter] right? All right, depending on how you look at that. Yes. You have to define yourself in some way or another, right? We we covered that in the ego episode, like you you to pick some self-definition and whatever self-definition you choose is going to be the definition that fails at some point. And it is that failure that is evolutionarily useful because as soon as it fails, that is what motivates

36:57you to change your behavior and act differently in the future, which is of course your way of learning, right? So, the learning is generally it's going to happen, you know, unless there are times where you can kind of live in denial Sure. Sure. You know, Freud Freud had his defense mechanisms, which I think in many ways prevented learning. I think that they were defined in such a way that it was like there were ways that people protected their ego in a way that prevented them from having to learn, right? So, it's like you you develop a strong sense of denial or you project your own flaws on the

37:29other people as a way to protect your ego and because you're protecting your ego, your ego never gets harmed and because it never gets harmed, you never have to learn and grow and develop a new self-definition. This this comes back to the fact that it's just like growth is fundamentally rooted in pain. Failure is inevitable no matter how you define your goals, your aims, your identity, you are choosing the future ways in which you are going to fail. And so, the game is not necessarily learning from failure because as long as you're just honest about failure, that's going to happen

38:00anyway. The game is not avoiding failure because that's impossible. The game is is choosing the right goals and identity so that you have good failures. So, that pain is worth it. Yeah. Okay. Right? So, it a very crude example, if I define myself as uh a family man, right? That is a self-definition that's

38:27I'm going to fail at at some point. Yeah. And each time I fail at that, I'm probably going to going to become better in my relationships, become more loving, better with intimacy, better with communication, become a better family man. If I define myself as a meth head, I'm setting myself up for a series of failures that are like not going to help me very much, right? I'm being very inefficient in sourcing meth in downtown LA right now,

38:51right? [laughter] Whereas whereas if you just find yourself as a family man, that pain is very informative and will guide you along the way into becoming closer in line with your values or what you actually want to be and something that's very chosen and intentional. Correct. Okay. Before we can even talk about growing from failure,

39:09Uh-huh. which we will talk about that towards the end of the episode, we have to talk about what are we how are we defining ourselves because the way we define ourselves defines what our failures are going to be, right? Right. I'm not a golfer, so I don't give a [ __ ] if I miss a par

39:25putt. Tiger Woods probably gives a lot of [ __ ] Serious. if he misses a par putt, right? So for me it's not a failure. I don't care. Right. Tiger Woods, it's like it probably feels life and life or death to him at certain points. Yeah. I brought this up several times in the change episode. I kept saying, you know, pain is a great

39:45teacher. Mhm. And I think this is a little bit where the rubber hits the road with it. Yeah. Pay attention to what what's causing you pain. And if you like dig underneath of it, I think we're going to talk about this a lot going forward, but if you dig underneath of that, is that pain worth it? Is that pain really what like the the family man versus the meth head, right? Which one of those pains is a

40:04better pain to have? Yes. Like I think that's what I was trying to get at in the change episode. That's kind of what I was trying to get at in the change episode. Like pain is a great teacher, like listen to it. Don't don't avoid it. Cuz the chapter of my book is called

40:14failure's the way forward. Uh-huh. And it this is why that just feels very surface level, you know, at at this point because it's yeah, it is the way forward, but it's it's the way forward for what, right? Uh okay. Like if if you are failing at something that is a waste of your time, it's probably good you're failing. You probably don't want to move forward. And you see this a lot. Like we're going to talk about quitting later and and what the difference is between quitting being a success and quitting something being a failure. And I think a lot of it has to do with understanding like is something

40:46worth failing at? Is something worth pursuing in the first place because if it's not worth pursuing in the first place, then failure like failing at that thing is a good thing. You should I should hope that I'm not very good at being a meth head. care. I would hope so, too. Unfortunately, I'm prodigious at acquiring [laughter] meth on the streets

41:09of LA. Yeah. Yeah. I just appear to be like uh Isaac Newton of uh [laughter] And yet here you are. Yeah, here I am. Talking to you. Yeah. What are some good ways that you define failure for yourself throughout your life? And what are some bad ways? Just professionally speaking, I've if I have like I guess I haven't been fired from really any jobs that I think of, but I've definitely failed

41:33Not yet. Right. [laughter] Yeah. Right. We'll talk about that. [laughter] But when I have like I've gone into something and I didn't it just didn't work or I quit I left grad school like I've talked about that plenty of times before. I never saw that as a failure. I did really see that as oh uh the pain I was experiencing during that was pain I really didn't want. So, I'm getting the hell out. So, I think that was a healthy way to see it. Every time that I have though like a an unhealthy way to see it has always been it's someone else's standard or someone else's definition

42:05that I've not lived up to and I probably felt that sting that we're talking about the sociometer sting. Yeah. And not really paid attention to why and just felt bad and just externalized all of it, thought that I was just a failure and like how could I live up to this that the other thing? It was always some external standard usually that that I was failing to live up to. I think that's a big difference for me

42:27anyway. I don't know. I definitely relate to that. I when I think about it I I think about it like my early dating and relationships. Like I very much was like a very I was very superficial and I like I viewed my success at dating really just in terms of like how many women I went out with and how many I hooked up with and I would eventually happened and I I wrote about this in my dating book many years ago. What eventually happened is I realized that like I was putting so much time and effort into like pursuing women that I

42:56didn't even actually enjoy being around. It was because of what you're saying. It's like I had I had kind of downloaded this this lame cultural script of like what a successful dating life as a young man was and was trying to live up to that regardless of how much I actually enjoyed the company of the women I was seeing and um and as soon as I flipped the the standard of success from I guess hooking up with lots of girls to like being happy and enjoying the women I spend time with

43:28it completely changed everything, right? And then then it it changed the the nature of the failure, right? So it was like before if I went on a date with a woman and she didn't call me back, that felt like a catastrophic evaluation of my worth as an as an individual. Whereas like when I change shifted the metric to just like having a happy good relationship with somebody um and I went on a date with a woman and she didn't call me back, it was like, oh, well, I guess we wouldn't have been

43:58happy together. Mhm. Good thing she didn't call me back. Right? Like it's no longer a failure. Like texting her a million times and like manipulating her to go back out with me would have been the failure right? Because it would have made us both miserable. Right. And some people some people would say, oh, you're deluding yourself and then you know, you're inflating your own ego or whatever and that's and you're deluding yourself. Well, you're deluding

44:18yourself either way really, right? There's a delusion on either direction of those. vector. You [laughter] may as well choose the one where it's telling you a better story and and giving you a better outcome and is aligned with what you actually want, not what other people are telling you and all of those arbitrary standards that you're putting on

44:35yourself. They just make yourself miserable. Yeah, and it's I think that the point and that came up in the research too is that you're going to feel bad when other people judge you whether you agree with them or not whether you even care about them or not. It's just going to feel bad no matter what. So you might as well pick the thing that's going to make you happy anyway, right? Like you're going to get criticized no matter what you do, so you might as well

44:59do what's best for you. Yeah. No, that's totally true. I guess I I get that like um I don't know if I I don't get a lot of over signals uh like from my family, you know, I'm like I'm not I'm not married I'm in my 40s. I'm not married I don't have kids and all that kind of stuff and

45:12I come from a pretty traditional family. Newly single ladies. [laughter] What talk about a failure. The more I don't know if we have time [laughter] in this podcast another episode. That's another episode. I see that too cuz I will tell myself I'm like, well, I don't care what they think and it's like I actually do. But when I sit down and think about it I'm like not but I'm still okay. Even though that that it kind of gets at me a little bit I'm like I'm still okay with like my choices and the way I've done this and Yeah, it's it's funny cuz yeah, it never

45:44things like that they never stop getting to you. It's like the comments, right? Like I get asked all the time by younger influencers creators they're like, when do you stop caring about? I'm like, you never stop. Yeah. You just get better at it. It's like public speaking, right? You never stop being nervous before you go speak in front of an audience. It doesn't bother you as much as time goes on. Like you get desensitized to it. Like that I

46:05think that's more of what happens. think that's where I'm at with it too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, believe it or not we're going to go even deeper on this. Which is way deeper than I think anybody asked for when they started this this episode, but um this is why we're here. Let's get weird. [laughter] We're going to go way too deep and get

46:24weird. Yeah. Uh so the in the next chapter I mean what I'd like listeners to do is is think about one of the largest failures that they have experienced in the last few years and and take a moment and think about what are what are the assumptions or or yardsticks that they are using to measure that failure. Like what what are what's the underlying assumption or value that defines that failure. In many cases I think people don't realize that they didn't actually accept the terms of of their failure. Like they just kind of in inherited it from the people around them. So, that's the first thing

47:03I want them to do. But then, I want them, as we go into the next chapter and we start talking a little bit more deeply about this identity stuff and um and how we're measuring ourselves and the ego and where all this stuff comes from in the first place and does any of it matter. I want them to keep keep that in mind as we work

47:25through it. So, as you know, for many months we've been joking about doing an episode on religion. Religion solved. And surprisingly, a lot of people in the audience have encouraged us to do it. So, this next chapter, it's going to be we're going to dip our toe in the water and we're we're not going to get religious, but we are going to use two of the world's most prominent religions as a way of of investigating how we define failure and how we define ourselves in

47:52the first place. Hey guys, thank you for sticking around for chapter two of the failure solved episode. Chapter three is where things are going to get a little bit weird. New chapters drop every few days here on the channel, so subscribe to make sure you don't miss them. Or if you don't want to wait, the full episode is already on the channel right now. The link is in the description below. And if you want to go deeper on your own time, you can get a free PDF guide at

48:19solvedpodcast.com/failure. It has all of our references, citations, exercises, and takeaways from this episode and it is 100% free. Go check it out.