2022-05-08 ------------------------------------------------------------------ When you fail, it is a message from the world, or a message from yourself. The subtlety is in knowing when the message is true. You can fail once and never try again. You can keep failing forever at the impossible. In both cases you have wasted your life for not understanding the question. How to find the bleeding edge of failure? If you fail only once, you have not gone far enough. If you fail a million times, you are equally misguided. I find there are areas of continuous frustration that lead to successes in surprising tangents. There are themes I keep chewing in my head that go absolutely nowhere, intellectually. Yet, this chewing makes my thinking more flexible somehow and reflects to some form of conversational skill, for example. Looking at anything I am reasonably good at, I got there through the kitchen door, sometimes unthinkingly almost, after failing getting in through the main gates. I think I am only starting to see the outlines of the dynamics now. I have not been very good at putting in the effort in the past. You need some conscious doggedness to summon the energy, but the miracle happens by itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------