Brad Stulberg

That's how the Greeks thought about this term.

Yeah, you know, the chapter on failure in the book is the shortest chapter.

It's two pages.

And what I wrote is that failure sucks.

It's also inevitable.

Keep going.

The poet David White says that the things that you care about are the things that break your heart.

So I think that it's just an expectation that like it's going to hurt.

It's going to suck.

How I personally deal with disappointments is I often think about the 48-hour rule.

So this is true for success too.

I give myself 48 hours to grieve the defeat and to feel all the feelings, and then I get back to doing the work itself.

Or in the case of success, I give myself 48 hours to celebrate the success, to be on the dopamine bender of the high, and then it's back to the work itself.

And there's nothing special about 48 hours.

If you just fell devastatingly short of an Olympic medal, maybe you're going to take two weeks or a month.

But eventually, you've got to, with a gentle yet firm persistence, nudge yourself back into the actual training.

Because it's the actual training where you are with training partners, where you're doing the work that is going to situate you in the actual work itself, which again, this is not just cliche.

The satisfaction comes in the work itself.

It does not come on the podium.

But we experience all this disappointment because we care deeply when we don't get on the podium.