Many working lives contain one serious attempt at something. The business that ran for eighteen months on savings and closed owing the bank. The move abroad that ended with a flight home and the old job taken back a grade lower. The year spent writing, followed by the decade spent not mentioning it. What came afterwards was caution. It tends to get called being afraid to try again after failure, as if the nerve had simply gone, and it was more sensible than that, since the attempt had cost a great deal and there was only so much left to spend.
The admired stories of persistence run differently. Six failures and a seventh go. The second business built out of what was left of the first. The manuscript sent out for the fortieth time after thirty-nine polite refusals. They are told as stories about character, and the implication is that anyone could manage the same with enough nerve.
Every one of those tries had to be survived before the next could be made. The seventh needed whoever made it to be solvent, rested and still willing after the sixth, which depends far less on temperament than on what the first six cost. The usual objection, that failure is a privilege and persistence comes easily to those who can afford to fail, is correct. Persistence is priced. Where a miss costs little, going again is easy, and where a miss costs everything, there is nothing left to go again with.
How Many Attempts a Life Holds
Anything substantial draws on three reserves: money, time and standing. The money is the savings that go in, or the salary that stops. The time is the months or years the thing occupies. Standing is harder to measure (the cost of being seen to fail by people whose opinion follows you into the next room), and in a small circle it is often the most expensive of the three.
Divide what you hold of each by what a single try consumes and the result is a rough count of how many tries a life contains. For much of modern working life, that count has been small. A shop that needed a lease, stock and a year's savings could be opened once, perhaps twice, in a career. A change of profession that meant three years of retraining was the kind of thing done once. At those prices caution is correct, and the advice to be realistic and keep the job was usually reading the price accurately.
A Verdict or a Sample
The count changes what a failure means. With two tries in hand, a failure reads as a verdict: on the idea, on your judgement, on whether you were ever the sort of person who should have tried. With forty in hand, the same failure reads as a sample, one result among many, saying something about this approach on this occasion and very little about you.
The event can be identical (the launch that drew no interest, the proposal turned down, the product that sold eleven copies). What differs is the weight, and the weight comes almost entirely from the number of tries left. Much of what gets admired as resilience is the habit of treating failure as data, and the habit comes easily to those who could afford many tries. Those with two tries experienced failure as a verdict, because at their prices it was one.
Samples also teach in a way verdicts rarely do. A run of small failures shows which part went wrong, and the next go can change that part and keep the rest. A single large failure teaches mainly that failing hurts, and the lesson usually drawn from it is to avoid the whole category for the next fifteen years.
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