On how I see failure.
Depending on the failure, year by year I stop treating them as a big deal when they happen.
If there's a vessel for tolerating failure, that vessel got bigger.
But when I recall past failures that shocked me, it doesn't seem like my stress tolerance itself got stronger.
What widened is the range of interpretations around failure — for me, treating stress tolerance itself as roughly unchanged fits better.
In other words, sensitivity to failure hasn't changed. And that sensitivity is driven less by "stress tolerance then vs now" than by how my body feels that day or season.
In words, the image is something like this.
For a challenge of size "1," the physical and mental energy I used to pour in was "1"; now it can take about "0.5."
If the negative return on failure is the same "1" (depending on size), then relative to energy invested: before it was 1/1 = 1; now it's 0.5/1 = 1/2.
If we invent an index called "failure impact," a simple model so far looks like this.
[Failure impact (I) = [Energy invested (E) × Stress sensitivity (S)] / Negative value of failure (N)]
So to drive failure impact toward zero:
・Can you keep invested energy low?
・Did you move so the negative value of failure stays small?
・Can you keep stress sensitivity low?
And the variables for those are:
(E) [Ability] Keeping invested energy low
(S) [Condition] Body state that keeps stress sensitivity low
(N) [Action] Acting so the negative value of failure stays small
That's the idea.
Hypothesis: if you can [raise ability, act while reducing risk, and keep your body in shape], failure impact shrinks.
External factors may change things, but the controllable factors inside look like this.
(E) [Ability] Learning, outsourcing, and loss tolerance from higher earnings
(S) [Condition] Habits of sleep, food, and exercise
(N) [Action] Project design, quality of moves, volume of moves
That's one section.
So far the topic is how to [lower failure impact].
Next: [growth through failure].
First, "is failure literally just a loss?" — I think that's [half yes / half no].
In the past I also wrote a blog, "Failure is not the mother of success". (Five years ago already! Surprising how fast that went.)
As the title says: don't over-value failure — with preparation you might have prevented it.
I still think that.
Still, in reality failure is unavoidable.
Given that, asking yourself "Am I still stretching my full energy into challenges the way I used to?" is necessary from a growth perspective.
Simply put: when I challenged something before, I poured everything I had.
Fail then, and the negative return was huge.
Looking back with past knowledge and time, I could have prepared more — but what's done is done.
On a graph it's a big downward point — but if you get back up and keep challenging, you recover. (That recovery experience is growth.)
Failing doesn't lower ability itself — but you do lose time, confidence, money, and so on.
When you grow through failure, you gain a "flexibility of thinking you didn't have before, informed by failure."
That raises the quantity and quality of (E) [Ability] and (N) [Action]. Same failures get harder to repeat.
When you plan strategy, failure creates new branches — an [updated win pattern].
Continuous success is unrealistic; you learn through the loop of challenge → fail → grow.
So I want to look back now and then: am I taking large challenges scaled to my energy, accepting that failure can cost a lot, while zooming out on a long timeline?
Still, as I've written before: anyone can just take risk. Resources are finite, so it's always tradeoffs. In other words, there are differences in the "quality of failure."
Bigger downside isn't automatically better. There are far too many variables to draw growth as a simple 2D graph.
That's all.
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