Elizabeth Day

Most failures can teach us something meaningful about ourselves if we choose to listen and, besides, success tastes all the sweeter if you’ve fought for it.

Our mental muscles require just as much working out as our physical ones.

In our modern age, we are bombarded with success stories to such an extent that we are in danger of believing exceptionalism is the norm. Logically, it can’t be so.

Embracing failure is embracing growth.

But there is a difference between pain and suffering, between the event and the victimhood. Pain, like failure, happens to us all. We accidentally burn our tongue on a cup of tea that is too hot. There is the immediate pain, which hopefully subsides quite quickly. Then there is the subsequent suffering, which lasts a bit longer as we struggle to taste food for a few days. But imagine beating yourself up about the fact that you’d been stupid enough to burn your tongue for several weeks and months afterwards? That would be prolonging suffering unnecessarily.

Once you start dismantling the ‘plan’ you had for yourself, you come to realise that the failure to stick to it might not be as wounding as you first imagined.

What it should be about is just thinking, “Well, all I can do is the best I can do, in the way I think is the best way, and we’ll see what happens at the end” …

‘It took me a long time to realise that I can’t change other people. And I can’t actually control other people. I don’t control what they do. I can only control myself’

We were observing before we were reacting.

So, I asked, is the next step to observe that but not to attach emotion to it?
‘Right,’ he said. ‘If you are attaching some emotion or expectation then you become mindful [of that]: “Oh, I’m expecting something wonderful to happen. But it’s not happening. I feel like a failure.”’
The key to meditation, he continued, is ‘to see yourself objectively in a non-judgemental way: that’s the meditation.’