Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Merlin Mann: Resilience means focusing on the work more than success or failure

From the Systematic podcast featuring Merlin Mann of Inbox Zero and 43 Folders. The topic is "failing gracefully," and in this excerpt (about 12 minutes from the start of the interview) he discusses that perhaps "doing the work" again and again is more important than tallying individual successes and failures. This is a reminiscent of the Arthur Ashe quote we posted recently:

When you're troubleshooting why your failures are not moving you further along.... you can take it too far.... it can be self-defeating. You can go too far, and try to learn too much from your failures.

Sometimes things just don't work out.... But, if you care a lot about what it is that you're doing, then you have to be open to the idea that it's going to go in all kinds of directions that you didn't expect, and that's the bigger pattern to me. Success and failure, you can look at as a post-mortem on something, after you've succeeded or abandoned it or had it taken away from you.

The people who push out a lot of stuff over time are resilient in a much higher-level way. Which means: they just believe in doing the work, and moving forward. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. Woody Allen puts out a movie every year. I haven't seen all of them, but that's his job.

His job is that he makes movies and that's the thing that he does.

Hat tip Tuuti Piippo.

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