Pursuing meaning requires being willing to lose

It’s wise to pick our battles. Instinctively, we take on challenges that we think we can succeed at. We shy away from things that we’re not good at because we don’t enjoy the struggle and we fear failure.

This way of thinking seems useful for maximising our effectiveness. Why should we waste time and effort doing things that we’re likely to fail at? The tendency isn’t just about efficiency, though. It also draws on our innate safety bias, where we prefer to avoid a loss rather than risk a gain.

Often, however, we are called to fight in what seems like a losing battle.

Sometimes that call comes from the outside – you’re asked to give a presentation at work that you don’t feel qualified to do, or you’ve come across someone in a crisis and you aren’t sure how to help, or your father-in-law insists on playing chess every time he visits. These external situations are at times unavoidable, and the way we often make them palatable is to reduce our chances of failure by preparing in advance, calling in help, or getting better at that task.

Sometimes, however, the call to take on what looks like a losing battle comes from the inside. It’s the nagging urge to ask that person on a date, start a business, or master sourdough. In this case, it’s all too easy to ignore these inner drivers if we feel that all that awaits is failure. We push them down, think ourselves out of it, and focus our energy and attention on something else with a better chance of success. And if we do that, we aren’t being true to ourselves, and we’re feeding our anxiety. We’re heading towards a small life, where we only want to do what feels safe and will reward us with victory, and not what is meaningful.

However, a simple change of attitude immediately opens up the scope and range of our day-to-day lives. The criteria for stepping into the ring is not whether we think we have a good chance of winning, but whether we feel we can tolerate losing. This idea, in some form, was around in Roman times, in the saying, “Audentes Fortuna Iuvat” (Fortune favours the bold) and was popularised in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as “Nothing ventured, nothing gained”.

Consider someone in the process of dating. If their chance of success is one of their main drivers in choosing which connections to pursue, they are leaving aside a deeper value, which is finding a partner who they can have a meaningful, rewarding connection with.

Instead of hesitating, probing, and waiting for favourable signs before taking that chance, they can make a value judgement – is this important enough to me to risk loss (rejection), and if that happens, will I be able cope?

One technique that helps with this is Viktor Frankl’s paradoxical intention. Viktor Frankl developed Logotherapy, as outlined in his famous book, Man’s search for meaning. In Logotherapy, some anxieties can be addressed through paradoxical intention. This involves actively seeking out the thing that we’re anxious about, in part to desensitise us.

So, for example, through paradoxical intention the person on the adventure that is dating might actively pursue all the connections that they felt would end in rejection, thereby learning how to cope with rejection and no longer fearing it, and learning to think differently about needing to feel secure of success before pursuing something meaningful.

"Success is not final; failure is not fatal."
Winston Churchill