I started bouldering in July 2022, and broke my ankle bouldering in August 2022. Indoor bouldering hurts, it's (initially) dangerous[^1], and you spend most of your time falling off the wall. One of the coaches at my local gym shared a similar anti-pitch for the sport with me in the context of how effective it is with _getting comfortable with failure_. ## A digression This coach was in DCI, which is as close as you can get to Professional Marching Band -- elite groups of HS-and-college-age musicians who, for that summer, represent the absolute peak of musical performance that can be accomplished while achieving a proportionate feat of athletic performance. That is, they're very good. I was in band in MS and HS, and I tried Very Hard. I was always[^2] first chair, a Drill Instructor, and went to various levels of region and state competitions every year. I was also a "Gifted and Talented" kid in HS, and AP student, and generally hung out exclusively with the kids who would end up being top 10. Everyone who shared a similar experience understands that this story ends not necessarily with great success, but an anxiety order diagnosis and a prescription for Wellbutrin. That is to say, I was not well acclimated to failure. ## Back to the point Everyone wants to be good at something. We want to be successful in our hobbies: we want to play guitar well, and we want to send the soft v6 on the new set. We want to do these things so we can use them as parts of our identities. You're the guy who plays guitar, the guy who sent the v6 on the new set. Failing at them invalidates that sense of our identity. I'm actually the guy sounds like terrible on guitar, and I'm the guy who couldn't make it past the first two moves on the "supposedly soft" v6. So we agonize over falling in front of our friends, popping off that nasty inside cross to a two-finger pocket, and we give up because it's too hard and it's not fun it's not worth the risk and the routesetters actually set that way too hard for a v6 anyway. ## Failing is the Doing, is the Trying You can also recontextualize what you're doing. Unfortunately, anything I'd say here would just be a paraphrase of the Yoda quote. You're just trying. It doesn't matter if you're failing, you're just doing it. Maybe you spend the whole day at work wishing you were climbing, talking about it with your friends in the group chat -- then you get to the gym, get on the wall, and give up. Or, you could see that failing at it is in fact the _majority_ of what you'll spend your time doing. Doing the thing you're trying to do is the _last thing_ you do after you've spent all the time _trying to do it_ (or as some might call it, _failing to do it_). This narrow perspective kept me from both trying new things *and* enjoying the things I wanted to do for ages. I'd had it in my head that I was the "kind of person" ([[There Are No Kinds of People]]) that was inherently good at things. Having to actually _work_ at anything frustrated me because it needlessly conflicted this deep concept of who I was – even if I was doing something as mundane as learning a new card game. There's a crucial perspective shift that happens when you really spend a long time being bad at something. When you go far enough down that path that you can't see the "you just started" end *or* the "you're good at it now" end. The failure simply becomes the experience -- the entirety of what you're doing. It stops being _failure_ and just becomes _doing the thing_. This perspective is transferrable. You become practiced at remembering that the failing at the thing is the doing of the thing. You bring that to work, and find that of course container orchestration is very complex -- that's why you're having to try again so many times -- but here you are, orchestrating containers. You go home, and remember that understanding the internal experience of another person is the ultimate challenge, and that in listening and trying to understand following an argument, you are being a good partner, even if it started with an argument. Failure is the doing of the thing. Getting comfortable with failure is the quickest way to both enjoying something, and getting good at the thing. [^1]: It's really funny to say you just "shouldn't fall" but you legitimately do get pretty good about knowing _what_ is going to make you fall and then not doing it. [^2]: There's nothing like getting 2nd chair to motivate yourself to not be 2nd chair again -- a story that could well be the meat of this essay itself, but it's less interesting.