Wednesday, 08 October 2008

• On Failure

  One of the most often-extolled virtue of the modern age is perseverance. Resilience in the face of hardship is just the kind of stubbornness that we adore as a society. Not me, though. I find I often prefer the exact opposite – strategic retreat.
  

  Take, for example, criticism at work. Say your boss takes an instant dislike to you. Say he suggests you are a born failure, and will never succeed at anything. Some may be galvanised by this sort of thing into a better sort of behaviour. Some may become determined to show their boss the error of his assumptions – prove him wrong, if you will, by being the best employee he’s ever had. My response would more likely be a strategic retreat – quit haughtily, and mail him a letter bomb later (if I don’t burn down the building, then vacation on some exotic island). I remove myself from the situation, while at the same time shooting backwards in the saddle.

  Or, at least, that’s the plan. Of course, sometimes it ends up with the nose, face, cutting, and spiting, and all that. But every strategy occasionally fails. That’s not the point here. Why endure unpleasantness if you don’t have to? Retreating, rather than sticking around to fight it out can work out for you. Look at history; a number of times, when invaded, the inhabitants of certain countries decided sticking around to be wiped out was a bad idea -  much better to invade your neighbour in the other direction instead. That’s how the Turks came to form the Ottoman Empire. It’s why the Germans overran the Roman Empire. No harm, no foul. Of course, if the Romans had been willing to pick up and conquer the new world instead of hanging around to be sacked by all manner of Germanic barbarians, we might all be speaking Latin today.
  

  
  

  So you see, the trait of perseverance in the face of hardship is hardly particularly very laudable at all! A recipe for hardship and suffering, more like. Much better to improve your own situation by instead finding better grazing pastures elsewhere. As they say, the inflexible and unbending reed is snapped by the wind. Turn your own ‘failure’ into somebody else’s by passing on the suffering! And remember at all times the model set out before us by the brave Visigoths, who, in their cowardly attempt to escape the Huns, managed to bring down the world’s strongest empire of the time.

  • 11:12 AM
  • 4331 Views
  • 38 eProps
  • 28 Comments