Thread by @dakami

There is only one Actually Bad Idea.

"You must be perfect. To fail once is to be exiled forever."

I see this concept, this burden, this prediction in people, systems, and sometimes myself. I have never seen it be useful or true, ever. Not once.

You get to fail. How you learn.

I don't say this much, but if there's somebody in your life that needs to see that message, please forward it to them. I've never seen any idea ruin more lives than desperate perfection. I've never been more relieved than when I realized, OK, I'm still here. I get to learn.

There's an addendum here, and it's a bit dangerous to talk about. But I want to say this here, now. It may help.

Men and women both suffer from this "one and done" fear of failure error. Bug in western culture.

The bug does not seem to expose the same across gender lines.

This may be an American thing, or a childless thing, or a single thing. I don't think it's racial. I'd be ecstatic for hard data here.

Women seem much more likely to believe not just that they must be perfect, but that they must be perfect in *all* things, even if they conflict.

I don't want to speculate from where this difference stems, but I do want to actually call it out, because it has hurt friends of mine in ways I couldn't be. I'm a nerd. I'm pretty tall. People thought maybe I could play basketball.

Haha, no. And that was OK. I had other skills.

Thinking you have to be good at everything means you see people with skills you lack, as somebody who you must learn from (at best) or somebody who demonstrates your failure (at worst).

There are *always* people with skills you lack.And it's impossible to be all possible things!

I *am* somebody who tries to learn a lot of things in a lot of fields, so don't think I don't know the space. The only way I can navigate it is by accepting my imperfect knowledge. Failure is built into the model. I "ghost bust" my discoveries, and *often* find them flawed.

There is a *tremendous* survivorship bias, then, in what anyone talks about. Even me. Maybe especially.

But I don't try to do completely incompatible things. Working organizations blend the talents of many personality types. I did tech. Others did strategy, ops, and legal.

You get to fail. If you commit yourself to sufficiently incompatible goals, you absolutely will fail. But guess what: Even that guaranteed failure, is OK. You get that failure too. You won't be exiled, cast out, you are the weakest link, goodbye. You failed, now you learn.

If you want somebody to invest in you, don't just show them your success.

Show them your growth. The most impressive people in my life are not those who "have the knack". They're the ones that didn't, and then did, or didn't, and hired someone who did. I've seen both. TALENT.

I don't know if this will help anyone, but it's the most important thing I've realized.

You do not have to be perfect. You won't be. You get to fail. You get to learn. Most success comes from this learning.

People you love don't know this. It is a kind truth to share.

Coda: It's possible you are in an unkind place, that does work according to these rules. You get to leave, they get to fail, you will probably learn, they will possibly not. Be kind to yourself too.

That's probably the second most important thing I've learned.

Second Coda: The bar for me, straight white dude to proclaim, "Here's what women are doing wrong" is *incredibly* high. This is the scariest thing I've ever said on Twitter. I would have to think it was a matter of life and death.

And I do. This error destroys people. Friends.

I could well be wrong. One of the stranger things that's happened over the last decade or two is that the hard sciences got softer because the data got more difficult to acquire, but the soft sciences got harder because Internet.

So maybe we could find out. Or did.

I'm trying.