The Crash is Better than the Fall

life lessons from skiing — part ii

We’re often taught that failure is the best teacher.

Now to be honest I’m a little suspicious that the people teaching us this may have ulterior motives; venture capitalists encourage entrepreneurs to fail fast, for example, but they are backing many entrepreneurs and don’t care if 99 of them burn as long as one of them succeeds. They’re incentivized to want high aggregate risk so they can capture a high aggregate return; but whether the risk (and the failure) was really the best outcome for the 99 that failed is pretty debatable.

Annnnnnyway……….

Look let’s just take the wisdom at face value and assume that there is some iterative learning value in failure.

That’s what I told myself on the slopes today: if you want to improve your skiing, you’re going to have to take on more speed; with more speed, you’re going to have less control; with less control, you are more likely to wipe out (fail).

So I set myself a quota: you have to wipe out at least three times today. If you don’t, you’re not being aggressive enough, not learning on a steep enough curve (literally and figuratively).

Part of the logic was that taking on higher risk (speed) would lead to higher returns (improving my skiing). The other part of the logic was that by falling and getting back up and skiing on, I would build perseverance and grit, and would prove to myself that there is no reason to fear failure and that I can push through failure on the way to success.

In any case, I had made up my mind:

“You will ski until you fall,” I said out loud to myself on the slope. “And then you will rise and ski again. And again. And again.”

The very next moment, a wobbly-legged punk on a snowboard came barreling down the slope, slid wildly out of control, and slammed into my back at full speed, throwing me five meters down the mountain and knocking off both my skis.

I lay sprawled out in the snow, ice-burned across my side and with a sharp pain in my ribs.

I felt so angry.

Who the fuck was this guy, and why the fuck was he going down the mountain so much faster than he could handle?

Didn’t he know that his risky behavior could have consequences for everyone else around him?

How am I ever going to meet my wipe-out quota if I keep getting knocked over by other people??

Not far from me, the snowboarder was picking himself up out of the snow. As soon as he could, he staggered over to me and dropped down to his knees:

“Are you OK?” he asked. “I’m so sorry. I’m still a beginner and I just lost control.”

I was in pain and wanted to yell at him. I wanted to make him feel bad for what he’d done to me. I wanted him to suffer a bit more, to compensate for my suffering.

“Don’t worry about it, man.” I heard myself saying. “We all wipe out sometimes.”

And so together we got back up, we brushed ourselves off, and we skied off down the mountain.

You know what the most important takeaway from this whole story is?

Not the chagrined realization of my own hypocrisy in wanting to take more risk in my own practice while cursing others for taking more risk in theirs….

Not the abstract economic lesson that when pricing the risk vs. reward of learning from failure, we often discount the externalities that we impose on our environment and the people around us…

Not the sweet selfless thought that perhaps in crashing into me, this man was achieving one of the failures in his quota on the way to success, and that in some sense I was helping him along his way…

And certainly not the most obvious and heartwarming notion that perseverance need not be a lonely struggle, but can rather be a journey shared with the many around us who drive themselves to overcome.

No, my biggest takeaway is this:

Tolerance and empathy are greater virtues than perseverance and grit.

Dusting myself off and skiing on made me proud; but holstering my anger and empathizing with the man who had just hurt me made me prouder.

I want to believe that even if I hadn’t been able to carry on — if I’d been badly hurt, say — that I would have forgiven the man just the same.

Because I can’t control who will crash into me; I can only control how I react to it.

I set out with a logical program to fail my way to becoming a better skier.

But becoming a better skier isn’t the ultimate goal — it’s just a means toward an end. The ultimate goal is to become a better version of myself: more free and more in control.

And in that sense, I learned more from being the victim of someone else’s failure than I would have from being the master of my own.

Empathy trumps grit.

The crash is better than the fall.