There is something undeniably alive in what you’re describing: the sharpening that comes from voluntary exposure to difficulty. But I keep returning to another layer beneath it: attention.
Chaos expands capacity only if the interior remains coherent. Without disciplined attention, chaos does not awaken... it fragments. It produces noise rather than aliveness.
Perhaps the real training is not merely to rig for pain, but to cultivate the kind of perception that can metabolise intensity without dissolving into it. Otherwise the pro-failure posture risks becoming just another aesthetic of extremity.
Intensity alone is not transformation. Integration is. What do you think?
Excellent thought. My sense is you’re describing to inherent aspects of “rig for pain”. It is not a contradiction but rather a duality. When we used the expression it was not merely “lose yourself in a berserk fury”. It was actually “bring every neuron and cell into alignment for the accomplishment of this mission.” It was fully integrated. Does this address your point?
I think it does. If ‘rig for pain’ already implies alignment, then we’re closer than it first appeared. Perhaps the risk isn’t the principle itself but how easily it’s imitated without that internal coherence. The aesthetic of extremity can look like integration from the outside, while inside it’s fragmentation. The difference is invisible unless one has cultivated that alignment.
It is hard to win without failures. The indoctrination of “useful idiots” started with participation trophies for kids instead of having medals for winners.
You nailed it Barry: indoctrination. It is unforgivable to raise kids and ensure they never learn how good it feels to claw their way back onto their feet in a nurturing and health environment.
Interesting perspective. I am not entirely sure our culture "forbids" failure, per se. It most definitely glorifies success, and a particular expression of success. So, in a way, not succeeding in this particular way automatically renders one a failure. I can see how, then, an "obedience" claim can be made (people are obedient to the idea of success and follow what they think it takes to become successful). At the same time, fear of failure may produce the opposite reaction of striving for success. It may make a person rebel, as the hippies did in the 60's. The Bohemians. And many people do today. They check out. They are not obedient. Their failure by mainstream standards is their success in their own eyes.
I feel the need to speak for us "bio-hacking optimizers" here. LOL. It's a form of pain in itself. I'd love to eat all the stuff I gorged myself on when I was 20, stay up all night drinking and partying as I did in college, but in my 50s, that's absolutely not an option if I want to steer clear of doctors' offices. The way I see it is that counting calories and measuring supplements, carbs, and protein is the struggle that keeps me physically and mentally in shape for all the demanding adventures life has to offer. I can either do that or pay for meds, get joint transplants, and a whole new wardrobe as I climb up in size or two every year or so. I would rather endure the stress of staying healthy and strong than the stress of illness or losing my marbles. That's my "rig for pain." I don't expect to outlive the Earth. But I do want the longest healthspan I can squeeze out of life. It has nothing to do with failure and everything to do with having options. Being frail and sick diminishes my options. If I am going to hurt myself, I'd rather hurt myself doing something amazing, not getting off the couch.
There are many, many ways to rig for pain, and yours is certainly one. The bio-hackers I referred to are those who want to live forever without ever having lived. There is a massive difference between the two.
Great points. I believe the only failure is not learning from mistakes. If you embrace the mistakes and learn, if you search for them, you'll never fail.
OK, this was great until…”A twenty year old living like a seventy year old is missing out on something fundamentally human. “ as a representative of the 70-year-old community I resemble this remark.
We've become a culture of safety. Participation trophies and no one's a loser mentalities eliminate any risk. Hollywood and social media glamorizes and hypnotizes, making one feel they belong but with no stake in the game. It's a hard thing to ask for a great reset, but we're surely due for one.
I couldn't agree more Dana. The pendulum is swinging. The question is when and how hard it will come back. But there are those who are thinking about the right ideas and my sense is they will be there to make the most of it.
Also Sam, when your athletes fail, as their coach that is when they need you most. The greatest rowing coach at the USA collegiate level is a guy named Steve Galdstone. He has won National Championships four different times with four different programs, Cal, Brown, Cal, Yale. Unheard of, yet, his comment once was when my guys win, they don’t need me, they have achieved what they set out to do. WIN! They need me on the dock waiting for them when they lose. Then my job starts….There is nothing wrong in failing, nothing wrong in going out and getting your asses absolutely kicked. What you take from that, well it’s up to you. Strong men and women are left undaunted and back at again. I think your post was so timely. Most people have good tough stuff in them, they just need someone to help pull it out of them. That is our job, when confronted with their weakness. As the strong, we can defend, and nurture, but, mostly tell them get up off the floor and make a difference today. Chaos abounds, volatility is our friend. We remain calm when others panic. If course we are choking back our own concerns, but no time to waste. OODA Loop it and move in the direction we decided was the best way to ACT.
You have fully embraced the dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian archetypes here, Sam. What a beautiful wrestling match! 👏
My intellectual challenge, specially for you, is to finally come up with a word to replace FAILURE in all our essays about living the hero’s journey. It is a dirty little weasel word that keeps pushing us in the wrong direction in our thinking and judgments. Ready, set, go! 🚀
I bought Campbells book when you brought it up weeks ago and it’s sitting on my stack, but I’m not following your thread here. Are you saying he has a more productive way of articulating what I call failure?
Campbell probably has better words (he often does!), but this is just one of my personal peeves about language. We keep telling people not to feel bad about “failing” when the word is so full up with negative judgment (“You’re a FAILURE!”) from childhood and school and social media. It would be nice to have a word that was more neutral for falling short of a goal, a mission gone awry, not medalling at the Olympics, etc. I’ve never come up with one. “ERROR” chimes a little better because errors can be fixed with further effort and experimentation. But enough of my obsessing about finding the perfect word!
Haha this is interesting. I think I like failure for precisely that reason—we have the choice to blindly obey it as a vague abstraction, or to challenge it and complete redefine it. A bit of a Nieztschean inversion here.
Sam, in a culture that not only accepts mediocrity and hands out medals for participation we can only expect the “no fail mission” mindset. Winning on Wall Street is cheating the crap out of the smeals coming to your casino everyday. Not pushing mental and physical boundaries. Marine and SEAL selection and training break the “just show up and be rewarded” mode. A classic example of no fail is the parent who sees a rowing race or just crews training and puts their child in the sport. Binky will love this! It’s like watching swans gracefully ply the waters of our pond out back. Three weeks in Binky is no longer Binky rather Braxton the conqueror, palms blistered and scabbed over constantly tired and beat up and meeting every challenge of an unforgiving sport with a smile…feed me more pain! Seems mommy and daddy marshmallow forgot that underneath the swan were webbed feet paddling like mad. Braxton now lives for chaos and completion he or she is addicted. You know in real life and time that it all goes to shit as soon as you cross the line of departure. I only know from training, but it’s the same chaos especially at night, we did not have NVG’s and trained a lot at night! (Hmmm and phucked it up plenty I might add…) But we need chaos and fear and tired to exhaustion to live. The rest are just sleep walking through life. We should be screaming Go for it! Well the hell with the rest go for it everyday. At age 70 I smile at death at least once a day and say come and get me asshole….well sooner or later he will but in the meantime there is the challenge to push the edges of the envelope…screw confort but hey enjoy it when you have it! Great post! I am reinvigorated for the day’s operations of going out to shovel wet falling snow turning to ice over night…..!!!!
'Rig for pain' I love it. Just finished reading 'La Nostalgie du front' thanks for mentioning it. Chardin captured what a lot of us feel better than anyone I've read.
It was eery how well he nailed it. And it makes sense men like him and Ernst Jünger are so rarely spoken of in the mainstream. The man had a gift with words.
There is something undeniably alive in what you’re describing: the sharpening that comes from voluntary exposure to difficulty. But I keep returning to another layer beneath it: attention.
Chaos expands capacity only if the interior remains coherent. Without disciplined attention, chaos does not awaken... it fragments. It produces noise rather than aliveness.
Perhaps the real training is not merely to rig for pain, but to cultivate the kind of perception that can metabolise intensity without dissolving into it. Otherwise the pro-failure posture risks becoming just another aesthetic of extremity.
Intensity alone is not transformation. Integration is. What do you think?
Excellent thought. My sense is you’re describing to inherent aspects of “rig for pain”. It is not a contradiction but rather a duality. When we used the expression it was not merely “lose yourself in a berserk fury”. It was actually “bring every neuron and cell into alignment for the accomplishment of this mission.” It was fully integrated. Does this address your point?
I think it does. If ‘rig for pain’ already implies alignment, then we’re closer than it first appeared. Perhaps the risk isn’t the principle itself but how easily it’s imitated without that internal coherence. The aesthetic of extremity can look like integration from the outside, while inside it’s fragmentation. The difference is invisible unless one has cultivated that alignment.
Yes the imitation is key. It is astounding how often noble courses of action can be corrupted, innocently or even maliciously.
It is hard to win without failures. The indoctrination of “useful idiots” started with participation trophies for kids instead of having medals for winners.
You nailed it Barry: indoctrination. It is unforgivable to raise kids and ensure they never learn how good it feels to claw their way back onto their feet in a nurturing and health environment.
Living inside the bubble is safe. But a better life might be right outside the bubble, never to be experienced.
How can you know what is good, if you have never experienced bad?
Failure is the best teacher.
Yes—life is a spectrum. To only know one end is to never really live. I’m here for this.
I'll go you one better. Life is spatial, three dimensions. We are not on a simple line that allows movement only to the right or left.
Agreed—it could be a tesseract depending on which attributes we’re examining. We’re beautiful complex. And the more complex the more interesting.
Totalizing solutions fail totally. Everything is impermanent. Nice piece!
Let's go, Andrew. Extremely well said.
Interesting perspective. I am not entirely sure our culture "forbids" failure, per se. It most definitely glorifies success, and a particular expression of success. So, in a way, not succeeding in this particular way automatically renders one a failure. I can see how, then, an "obedience" claim can be made (people are obedient to the idea of success and follow what they think it takes to become successful). At the same time, fear of failure may produce the opposite reaction of striving for success. It may make a person rebel, as the hippies did in the 60's. The Bohemians. And many people do today. They check out. They are not obedient. Their failure by mainstream standards is their success in their own eyes.
I feel the need to speak for us "bio-hacking optimizers" here. LOL. It's a form of pain in itself. I'd love to eat all the stuff I gorged myself on when I was 20, stay up all night drinking and partying as I did in college, but in my 50s, that's absolutely not an option if I want to steer clear of doctors' offices. The way I see it is that counting calories and measuring supplements, carbs, and protein is the struggle that keeps me physically and mentally in shape for all the demanding adventures life has to offer. I can either do that or pay for meds, get joint transplants, and a whole new wardrobe as I climb up in size or two every year or so. I would rather endure the stress of staying healthy and strong than the stress of illness or losing my marbles. That's my "rig for pain." I don't expect to outlive the Earth. But I do want the longest healthspan I can squeeze out of life. It has nothing to do with failure and everything to do with having options. Being frail and sick diminishes my options. If I am going to hurt myself, I'd rather hurt myself doing something amazing, not getting off the couch.
There are many, many ways to rig for pain, and yours is certainly one. The bio-hackers I referred to are those who want to live forever without ever having lived. There is a massive difference between the two.
Great points. I believe the only failure is not learning from mistakes. If you embrace the mistakes and learn, if you search for them, you'll never fail.
100%. Pure growth potential so long as the individual/organization allows for it. We have fortunately been able to witness it in our communities.
Rig for pain - now, that is wise.
Indeed it is. One of those bits of ancient wisdom it is time to resurrect. Thanks Betsy.
OK, this was great until…”A twenty year old living like a seventy year old is missing out on something fundamentally human. “ as a representative of the 70-year-old community I resemble this remark.
No! Another reader fleshed out the other half of the equation: a 70 year old who lives like a 20 year old is doing it right. I totally agree
One of my favorite sayings is, “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging“🤣
Marshall it is my dream to be able to ski, deadlift, and think when I reach your age... I probably won't reach half of your current capacity to crush.
We've become a culture of safety. Participation trophies and no one's a loser mentalities eliminate any risk. Hollywood and social media glamorizes and hypnotizes, making one feel they belong but with no stake in the game. It's a hard thing to ask for a great reset, but we're surely due for one.
I couldn't agree more Dana. The pendulum is swinging. The question is when and how hard it will come back. But there are those who are thinking about the right ideas and my sense is they will be there to make the most of it.
Also Sam, when your athletes fail, as their coach that is when they need you most. The greatest rowing coach at the USA collegiate level is a guy named Steve Galdstone. He has won National Championships four different times with four different programs, Cal, Brown, Cal, Yale. Unheard of, yet, his comment once was when my guys win, they don’t need me, they have achieved what they set out to do. WIN! They need me on the dock waiting for them when they lose. Then my job starts….There is nothing wrong in failing, nothing wrong in going out and getting your asses absolutely kicked. What you take from that, well it’s up to you. Strong men and women are left undaunted and back at again. I think your post was so timely. Most people have good tough stuff in them, they just need someone to help pull it out of them. That is our job, when confronted with their weakness. As the strong, we can defend, and nurture, but, mostly tell them get up off the floor and make a difference today. Chaos abounds, volatility is our friend. We remain calm when others panic. If course we are choking back our own concerns, but no time to waste. OODA Loop it and move in the direction we decided was the best way to ACT.
Agreed, it is an excellent forcing function: only those who dig it, lean into it, roll around in it, and make the most of it will stick around.
You have fully embraced the dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian archetypes here, Sam. What a beautiful wrestling match! 👏
My intellectual challenge, specially for you, is to finally come up with a word to replace FAILURE in all our essays about living the hero’s journey. It is a dirty little weasel word that keeps pushing us in the wrong direction in our thinking and judgments. Ready, set, go! 🚀
I bought Campbells book when you brought it up weeks ago and it’s sitting on my stack, but I’m not following your thread here. Are you saying he has a more productive way of articulating what I call failure?
Campbell probably has better words (he often does!), but this is just one of my personal peeves about language. We keep telling people not to feel bad about “failing” when the word is so full up with negative judgment (“You’re a FAILURE!”) from childhood and school and social media. It would be nice to have a word that was more neutral for falling short of a goal, a mission gone awry, not medalling at the Olympics, etc. I’ve never come up with one. “ERROR” chimes a little better because errors can be fixed with further effort and experimentation. But enough of my obsessing about finding the perfect word!
Haha this is interesting. I think I like failure for precisely that reason—we have the choice to blindly obey it as a vague abstraction, or to challenge it and complete redefine it. A bit of a Nieztschean inversion here.
I like the direction you’re pushing this/me, Sam. Thanks!
“I didn’t fail. I just discovered a thousand ways that don’t work.” — Thomas Edison
Murphy and his law a constant operational reality.
An evil best friend…
Sam, in a culture that not only accepts mediocrity and hands out medals for participation we can only expect the “no fail mission” mindset. Winning on Wall Street is cheating the crap out of the smeals coming to your casino everyday. Not pushing mental and physical boundaries. Marine and SEAL selection and training break the “just show up and be rewarded” mode. A classic example of no fail is the parent who sees a rowing race or just crews training and puts their child in the sport. Binky will love this! It’s like watching swans gracefully ply the waters of our pond out back. Three weeks in Binky is no longer Binky rather Braxton the conqueror, palms blistered and scabbed over constantly tired and beat up and meeting every challenge of an unforgiving sport with a smile…feed me more pain! Seems mommy and daddy marshmallow forgot that underneath the swan were webbed feet paddling like mad. Braxton now lives for chaos and completion he or she is addicted. You know in real life and time that it all goes to shit as soon as you cross the line of departure. I only know from training, but it’s the same chaos especially at night, we did not have NVG’s and trained a lot at night! (Hmmm and phucked it up plenty I might add…) But we need chaos and fear and tired to exhaustion to live. The rest are just sleep walking through life. We should be screaming Go for it! Well the hell with the rest go for it everyday. At age 70 I smile at death at least once a day and say come and get me asshole….well sooner or later he will but in the meantime there is the challenge to push the edges of the envelope…screw confort but hey enjoy it when you have it! Great post! I am reinvigorated for the day’s operations of going out to shovel wet falling snow turning to ice over night…..!!!!
This is probably the most motivating comment I have yet to receive on substack. Keep smiling, Charles—and thank you for motivating the hell out of me.
Dumb Marine Corps infantry officers like blond squirrels eventually find a nut!! Keep your fins by your side Frogman!!!
Blind squirrels…though we could get into the blonde jokes and that might be inspiring…or not!
😂😂😂
'Rig for pain' I love it. Just finished reading 'La Nostalgie du front' thanks for mentioning it. Chardin captured what a lot of us feel better than anyone I've read.
It was eery how well he nailed it. And it makes sense men like him and Ernst Jünger are so rarely spoken of in the mainstream. The man had a gift with words.