What I could do differently is judge myself less.
It’s kind of like this YouTube channel I’ve been watching: a father and son. The son grew up playing video games, and his dad always told him, “you’re wasting your time.” Now the dad is older and retired, and the son told him, “Hey—play a game with me. You’re going to play it yourself.”
So now the dad—the same guy who judged video games his whole life—is playing Elden Ring, the hardest fucking game… and he’s not doing that bad. And you can see it happening in real time: he’s starting to realize it wasn’t a waste of time. He’s starting to respect what his son was learning all those years.
And the reason it hits me is because the dad isn’t being rewarded for figuring it out fast—he’s being rewarded for learning the pattern.
Every time he loses, the pattern reveals itself. And every time the pattern reveals itself, he gets a little better. Then he loses again, and a new part of the pattern shows up. And it becomes this chain reaction of learning.
That’s what I want for my life.
I don’t want to judge my losses so harshly. I don’t want to call myself names. I don’t want to carry the outside voices that told me “you’re this, you’re that,” and then repeat them inside my own head.
I want to take the loss and understand: a pattern just got revealed.
And if I keep going—if I pay attention—more of the sequence shows itself. Even if I lose here and lose there, the mistakes uncover part of the map. Eventually you start seeing it: oh… I do this, then I do this, then I do that.
The mistakes didn’t prove I’m broken.
They unveiled the next step.
Question: What’s one “loss” you could reframe as data instead of proof?
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