How We Fail the Same Way. Twice. Again.

Age, education, background—none of these is the ultimate determinant of success. People prosper anyway. Nor is it the magnitude of the situation that stops us. It’s whether we allow ignorance to strip us of the will to stand back up and try something else.

Repetition is destiny only if we refuse to take responsibility for the state of our lives, for the part we played in getting us here. If a player refuses to watch the game tape, he’ll run the same play and make the same mistake until he gets cut. He’ll go to the next team, unchanged, and run the same play, the same way. Each time he goes down on that play, he stays down longer, gets up slower. The game isn’t harder; he’s weaker. He still won’t look at the footage. Eventually, he’ll stay on the ground, guarding the wound of his mistakes, dumbfounded. It’s his defiance, not the missteps, that cements his failure.

We blame and complain because it’s easy. It’s a passive activity that asks nothing from us. We will our pattern recognition offline in favor of the fantasy as a guard against a disappointing reality. Our ego stays intact. When things go bad, we can preach injustice and perform shock. Every line of thinking trails off into self-pity.

It’s true, people do exploit and mislead us. Some devise a strategy. And they don’t always announce themselves as puppeteers, though often enough they do. But our problem is that we plainly see their tactical insincerity and ignore it. Or worse, try to please the aggressor.

It’s not other people’s moves that hurt us; it’s our state of mind. One so fragile it can’t let in what we permitted, overlooked, or did outright. Without that insight, we can’t learn enough to capitalize on the defeat. All the denial steals the energy we need to redirect our lives.

If we’re helpless victims, misery is all we can manufacture. The antidote to victimhood is to look honestly at the decisions we made and the neon signs we ignored. Even if we didn’t cause it, we still chose to fall for it. It’s only when we can look at the part we play in our failures and fantasies without wincing that we discover we are powerful creators.

Fear of the future stems from bafflement about how we got here and why these things keep happening. The fear is accurate because, in that delusion, we will predictably repeat the past. But as soon as we can see we are creators, not victims of circumstance, we are free to do something else. We can create anything we want if we’re willing to let go of fantasy in favor of what’s real.

Nothing is wasted when we’re willing to look. We don’t have to feel good about our past failures. We just have to stop telling ourselves it’s a mystery.