When you try so hard and you donot succeed

Brian YS Wong November 24, 2024 22:41

One of my favourite songs of all time opens with,
“When you try so hard and you don’t succeed… When you get what you want, but not what you need.” Thanks, Coldplay.

Life is filled with frustrated aspirations. Many aspirations held by individuals are never realised as a result of a dearth of hard work, skill, and grit. But there are also many an instance where aspirations are left unfulfilled not for want of trying – but for a litany of extraneous factors beyond an individual’s control.

Straddling the two sets of cases are occurrences that are nominally impossible – or so we think – yet are empirically ubiquitous: where failure occurs due to results that are not wholly beyond one’s control, but the control of which would have required immense perseverance, luck, and capacity on the part of the individual. These cases are hard to identify, and even harder to classify and position in relation to the two ‘archetypal cases’ of so-called option and brute luck.

An example of instances of frustration caused by dispositional laziness or ineptitude – would be a very talented student refusing to study for an entrance exam on grounds of hubris and flunking it. An example of the other end of the spectrum, where individuals are wholly victims of the vicissitudes of life, would be the possession of a genetically inherited disease. We do not get to choose our parents. Nor do we get to decide what diseases we inherit from our parents.

Sitting in the awkward interim between the two ends, consists of most events in life. For one, rocking up late to a meeting as a result of unforeseen traffic is the product of both factors beyond one’s control (the traffic), and one’s intentional (even if justified) choice – i.e. to not wake up 2 hours in advance to avoid the unforeseeable but hypothetically possible traffic. Understanding the nuance, hybrid mixture of factors – both controllable and uncontrollable – undergirding these mishaps is vital. For such comprehension is the first step to our grappling with many cases of failure.
Trying hard and working hard are often necessary (but not always), yet rarely sufficient for success. Life coaches would say, one has to “work smart”, too – to direct one’s attention and focus, in a targeted manner, towards specific goals. This is pivotal in ensuring that one maximises one’s potential. Religious and spiritual advisors would encourage one to work both hard and in devotion to the Ways of the Lord – after all, the Deity has Its Ways, and we must not seek to contravene its vision. Then there are those who insist that perseverance and grit are critical in getting one to a threshold (say, 10,000 hours), beyond which hard work does pay off.

Yet I submit that all such explanations miss out on a more fundamental fact. In life, we are bound to encounter experiences and instances where, despite dedicating everything and all that we have to a particular cause, efforts alone remain simply insufficient. We have most certainly done our absolute best in these cases, yet still fall short of the seemingly impossible and unattainable bar. In these instances, how are we to cope with and make sense of failure?

I was inspired to ask and reflect upon this question by a highly thoughtful, passionate, and erudite young friend I know, who made the bid for a very competitive scholarship – yet couldn’t quite cross the final hurdle. He was eliminated in the final stage of the process.

To my friend, and to all those who try incredibly hard – yet for whom success eludes them, I would say this: it is absolutely understandable, and indeed most reasonable, for you to feel aggrieved about your ‘failure’.

You should feel aggrieved that your assiduous efforts and exceptional commitments did not pay off. You should embrace the vociferous and vigorous sentiments coursing through your veins – for these are the very emotions that render you real; that render you an authentic person with sincere wants and desires. Not only should you recognise the innate arbitrariness in what happened to you (given that your fate was determined largely by factors beyond your control); you should in fact embrace it – for doing so constitutes the first step of a much-needed and oft-overlooked healing process.
When we fail in life, we are often told that we must “move on”. Yet moving on cannot happen without a degree of contemplative dwelling. We need to dwell on something before we move on from it – for otherwise, there can be no real closure.

The second step, then, is to break down the causal attribution of the failure in question. Whilst it is apparent that there were forces beyond one’s control, and there is no clear way to eliminate them altogether from similar occurrences in the future (e.g. another application down the line), it is nevertheless for one to seek to shrink the region of the uncontrollable, and to expand the region of the controllable. In my view, genuine improvement is best defined by an enlargement of the set of elements that one can control, and the shrinking of the set of elements that one cannot. You should plan accordingly, with the aim of minimising undue deviations and variance.

And where this is not possible, you should make peace with the ubiquitous and blatant fact of arbitrariness. The third and final step to healing requires you to find peace. Peace does not come from perfection. Nor can peace emerge truthfully from blissful ignorance. One can only achieve peace by celebrating the inevitably defective nature of existence – we are no Gods, we are no Demons, we are only human. Try we must, in conquering the barriers and hurdles that stand in our way; yet where even Herculean efforts do not pay off, we can and should find solace in the fact that we have really, really tried – and that’s what ultimately matters.

Brian YS Wong

Assistant Professor, HKU