Author: Akshat Rathi

Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News. He has previously worked at Quartz, The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.

Mistakes and Failures: Why it’s important to differentiate

Akshat Rathi1 Comment

How many times have we looked back at a relatively short period of time (weeks or months) and realized all the things we wronged/failed at and then blamed ourselves for not doing better? I’ve done it many times and every time I’ve felt either miserable or angry.

We often don’t spend the time in differentiating between failures and mistakes and in treating them both as mistakes we lead ourselves on to the path of misery. Seth Godin explains the difference well:

A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal.

A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.

Failure is good because there is a lesson at the end of it. We fail and we should learn from those failures so as to not fail again. But when we treat our failures as mistakes, we also inevitably make the mistake of blaming ourselves for all those mistakes. That just ruins all the effort put in to contemplation.

It’s great to have the ability to rush through all that data from the past and cherry-pick that which shows us where we went wrong. We have made great progress because of this ability but only when we’ve also been successful at differentiating failures and mistakes.

(As a side – what makes it hard to do this differentiation is that looking back, of course, we have a lot more data to answer the same questions. A failure might seem like a mistake when it wasn’t at the time.)

No one likes failing or making mistakes but it is definitely easier to deal with the prior than the latter.

It should be about Choices not Goals

Akshat Rathi3 Comments

Previously, I have written about why I was unconvinced with Leo’s philosophy of living without goals and expectations. It was the logic in Leo’s arguments which had a flaw and not the concept. In the light of a new way of looking at the same problem, it seems to me that there may after all be a way to incorporate this way of living without ‘adverse’ consequences.

A Different Perspective

Instead of looking at what you want to do as goals, think about them as choices. For example, instead of considering ‘living a healthy life’ as a goal, treat is as a choice. Or consider ‘writing a book’ a choice not a goal. In doing so, attach value to the whole activity and not the just end point.

It’s a fundamentally different view of we tend to call goals. When we treat something as ‘our choice’, we are able to attach much more value to it. In a liberal society, we value other’s choices because we value our own as much. Even evolution supports giving choices more value because those who are able to make better choices are those who will survive longer.

Goals, on the other hand, don’t seem that personal and thus, less valuable. They seem to be something we conform to.  We should have goals because everyone else has them. We should have goals because that is the only way in which we can achieve great things.

The point I am trying to make is that choosing to do something without it being your ‘goal’ is a much more powerful motivator.

Goals: The Stressful Motivators

The idea of living without goals is scary. We create goals to motivate ourselves to do the work which we deem important. But there is a problem with this kind of motivation, it causes stress.

The stress of not achieving your goals (within the time frame) can motivate you to ‘get on with it’ but that kind of motivation can only last for so long. Where as choosing to do something means that one is doing that only because one derives pleasure from doing it. I think this kind of pleasure is greater than the pleasure of just achieving goals and thus can sustain one to not only complete what they started but also do better work. The pleasure may even help one achieve more than what they would’ve set a goal for.

Philosophically Speaking

Isn’t living without goals a goal in itself?

Unfortunately, the movement of ‘living without goals’ lacks the ability to counter that attack. A better name to this movement would be ‘living only by your choices’. But that’s not controversial enough for it to market well.

People ‘choose’ to live by goals. So what is it that I am claiming people should do that they are not already doing? 

Everyone lives by their own choices, of course. I am arguing for choosing to do something because you like to do it rather than choosing to do something that you do because it’s your goal. Even if people choose goals for the pleasure that they derive on achieving them, it’s a much more powerful motivator if you do something because you derive pleasure in the activity rather than in just finishing it.

Becoming a Strategic Self-Deceiver

Akshat Rathi6 Comments

A few weeks ago David Brooks of the New York Times asked his many readers for a gift, “If you are over 70,  I’d like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way.”

His reason to make such a request was clear, “These essays will be useful to the young. Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relatively little help in understanding how a life develops, how careers and families evolve, what are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood.” From the many essays that he received, he tried to extract a few general life lessons. One of those many fantastic lessons took me somewhat by surprise.

Beware rumination. There were many long, detailed essays by people who are experts at self-examination. They could finely calibrate each passing emotion. But these people often did not lead the happiest or most fulfilling lives. It’s not only that they were driven to introspection by bad events. Through self-obsession, they seemed to reinforce the very emotions, thoughts and habits they were trying to escape.

Many of the most impressive people, on the other hand, were strategic self-deceivers. When something bad was done to them, they forgot it, forgave it or were grateful for it. When it comes to self-narratives, honesty may not be the best policy.

Self-development is something I am passionate about and self-examination enables me to pursue that passion. Even though I won’t call myself a self-examination expert by any length, reading the above made me question what is it that I exactly do when I work  on self-development. I don’t want an obsession to improve myself to lead to an unhappy life!

But, while re-reading the paragraph, I realised that the more impressive people were ‘strategic self-deceivers’. So they selectively chose to lie to themselves about certain mistakes they made or about certain faults they had and moved on with life, eventually living an impressive life.

So was the route that I took for self-development through self-examination wrong? Not entirely. To be able to successfully deceive oneself would require one to know themselves well enough. Self-examination is then a necessary tool.

What I seem to be able to gather from this reflection is that self-examination can be a double-edged sword. It can lead to giving us the exact information we need about ourselves to enable us to build our confidence or, if over done, it can lead to reinforcing the very thoughts and habits that one wants to overcome.

But now let’s come to the more interesting part of the lesson – strategic self-deception.

Philosophers argue that one cannot, in principle, be successful at self-deception. The reason being that one can not try to convince oneself of something being false when they know that it is true. But leaving the philosophers aside, there are practical ways in which we employ self-deception, I would argue, everyday. I am ready to bet that any of you reading this is probably deceiving yourself of multiple truths right now (of course, if you are able to recognise what exactly it is that you are deceiving yourself about then you will have failed at self-deception!).

An example of self-deception is when we try to forget the pain associated with a certain event. It could be a break-up or the passing away of a loved one. We may be capable of accepting what happened and moving on but the shorter, faster route is to lie to oneself. It may also be an intermediate step in acceptance (when unsuccessful at pulling off this self-deception, we are supposed to be in denial).

Forgetting events, overcoming fears, facing danger and taking risks, all to a certain extent involve self-deception. We know, at some level, that we are very bad at analysing risks and to be able to do something risky (like bungee jumping) we have to convince ourselves that it is not as risky as it seems. In that self-deception enables the person to take risks that he would not normally.

A strategic self-deceiver is one who is able to trick themselves about the right things. Of course, knowing the right things is the more difficult part.