In another reality, it might be nice to know that anything you put effort into will succeed. It might be comforting to live with the security that you can avoid failure simply by trying.
But we don’t live in that reality. We live in this one.
And in this reality, you can try hard and still fail. You can put tons of effort into something that does not succeed as intended or at all. You can believe in something with all your heart and soul that just doesn’t work out.
But failure doesn’t mean your effort wasn’t time well spent. Efforts that end in failure don’t mean the activity of trying can’t be fun. The experience of an effort is different from the outcome of the effort.
We have a tendency to measure the enjoyment of an effort by the results it produces. I think that is a misguided mindset.
Results matter, but the experience matters, too. A competitive game between two teams will produce a winner and a loser. The winner experiences the thrill of victory. The loser experiences the agony of defeat. But both should be able to look back on the competition and think to themselves, “That was fun. That was worth the effort. Given the chance, I’d do it again.”
You are allowed to have fun with the experience of trying to win but still losing. That’s called competing.
You can enjoy trying to solve something but not succeeding. That’s called experimenting.
All of life is experimenting and competing, if you look at it through the right lens. Results will vary. Enjoy the experience. No matter what.
Event + Response = Outcome. Do the work.
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