When you fail, it is a message from the world, or a message from
yourself. The subtlety is in knowing when the message is true.
You can fail once and never try again. You can keep failing
forever at the impossible. In both cases you have wasted your
life for not understanding the question.
How to find the bleeding edge of failure? If you fail only once,
you have not gone far enough. If you fail a million times, you
are equally misguided.
I find there are areas of continuous frustration that lead to
successes in surprising tangents. There are themes I keep chewing
in my head that go absolutely nowhere, intellectually. Yet, this
chewing makes my thinking more flexible somehow and reflects to
some form of conversational skill, for example.
Looking at anything I am reasonably good at, I got there through
the kitchen door, sometimes unthinkingly almost, after failing
getting in through the main gates.
I think I am only starting to see the outlines of the dynamics
now. I have not been very good at putting in the effort in the
past. You need some conscious doggedness to summon the energy,
but the miracle happens by itself.
