KATANAGATARI 2

There’s this idea out there about how “Losing is Important,” how mistakes are the mother of success, and the more you think it over, losing is really not so bad. There isn’t always a reason for success, but there’s always a reason for failure─or so the saying goes, but this suggests that if you really want to succeed, it makes more sense to study how others have failed than how others have succeeded, and in my opinion, this is not necessarily the worst advice. If you know where others have tripped up, you can remain conscious of these areas and possibly avoid them, and if you keep on avoiding failure, pretty soon you’ll find yourself on the route to success─at least, theoretically. If this theory has one failing, it’s that “not failing” is not strictly the same as “succeeding” (as there are no small number of situations where a certain amount of “failure” is the price we have to pay in order to “succeed”), but in most cases, for most people, the desire to “succeed” is not nearly as strong as the desire “not to fail.” We’re not obsessed with being above average, but horrified at the thought of being below average. Know what I mean? If there’s anything I can say about all that, it’s that there’s nothing wrong with losing, but that doesn’t mean it always feels good. No one ever gets used to losing. Every time it happens, we get hurt again. Of course, we also think that “Winning is Important”─but “winning,” unlike “losing,” is something that we wind up getting used to, impudence and complacency being two obvious examples. It’s a sad fact, enough to make you feel like people are fundamentally negative creatures, but heading into things assuming that you’re going to fail defeats the purpose of doing anything at all. But then again, some monsters out there reach the highest heights of success only to tell themselves “I haven’t made it yet” and keep on pushing higher. People never cease to amaze me.