I’ve been reading Jordan Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life, and I’ve been absolutely loving it.

Jordan focuses a lot on the real things happening in the world, including failures. Regarding this, I stumbled upon the thought that accomplishments are valuable, more than I initially thought, because life is unfair and full of troubles.

Life is unfair. Troublesome. Almost no one cares about you more than he does about himself. A person who saved another from drawning in water gets run over by a car tomorrow. A man who is sitting in couch, watching TV in his apartment gets shot to death by a person living upstairs who mistook it for her apartment. You lose your wallet in metro. Your parents become sick. Your donation goes to some corrupt party that doesn’t have to do anything with those needing actual help. That’s exactly the life, albeit in more diverse forms.

On the other hand, there are accomplishments and successes too. You go to your dream university. You befriend absolutely lovable people. You break your own reps record for exercise. Your startup goes on an IPO. You get admitted to one of the world’s best companies. The guy you ask out says he wants to go out with you too. All sorts of things like this. We are happy when these things happen. Why? Because we know that these might not go as we want, but have turned out to be the way we want it to be. This makes success truly valuable, and we all know it.

I think that’s the real beauty of the life. Knowing that something might fail, but rejoicing when it does not. Imagine a life without failures. That’s like the cheat mode in your game. If you have played a game with a cheat, you know how it feels like. Virtually no sense of achievement at all, and you soon know that it’s not a game anymore and you are not enjoying it for that reason.

Human intellect is more than enough to grasp such a form of life. And even if we haven’t explicitly pondered upon this topic, we’ve been naturally rejoicing at successes due to failures.

So let us embrace the way the life works, and take a time to be grateful for all kinds of failures in life.

Written by Joel Mun. Joel likes Rust, GoLang, Typescript, Wasm and more. He also loves to enlarge the boundaries of his knowledge, mainly by reading books and watching lectures on Youtube. Guitar and piano are necessities at his home.