How to Face Failure with Mark Nepo | Dave Asprey

Your book is called Falling down and Getting up. And it's about resilience and strength. And one of the things I've noticed is when I was in my teens or twenties, the thought of failure was abhorrent. And I spent a lot of my early career burning myself out and being stupidly successful, but kind of chasing, or not chasing, but running away from failure, which is a super toxic way of living. And it leads you to have blind spots. And it's actually narcissistic, its worst expression. If that's the way a lot of people living today, it feels like it's even worse because, you know, like the idea that you could be triggered by being told that you're you failed so that no one can tell you you failed. And, you know, this whole fragile, you know, I have to have a gold star or I can't survive mindset. How does falling down and getting up resonate with someone who never has had experience of falling down because they got a participation trophy?

Yeah. So let. So let's back up a second, and I'll move into that by just noting, I think, that in the modern world, it's always been. But more acutely in the modern world, our definition of success and failure isn't very helpful. In a narcissistic culture, we tend to define success as getting what we want and failure as not getting what we want. That's actually a pretty infantile way of looking at success and failure because, you know, if I got most of the things I wanted, I might be dead by now. Not everything I want is what I need. I don't always know best. That's why experience is a great teacher. And so I think that often my experience has been there's nothing wrong with working for what we want. You know, like, I want, I. I don't want my wife to die. I want her to live a long time. You know, that's different than I want a Mercedes, you know, but often working for what I want in my life has turned out to be an apprenticeship for working with what I'm given, which is where our gifts truly show up. So it's fine to work for what we want, but, you know, often we don't get what we want and. Or we have dreams, and the dreams don't always come true. And I wouldn't say that's a failure. I think I've come to think of dreams as kindling for the fire of aliveness. And therefore I can give my all to working for my dreams. And even if they don't come True. Sometimes I come true. And that's more important. So now, with that in mind, falling down and getting up, you know, you can't. We create a lot of suffering by resisting legitimate suffering. Carl Jung said neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering. Really?

I love that quote.

Yeah, isn't that something? And so, you know, we can't. We can spend so much energy trying to avoid falling, but falling down or going in a different direction than we intended, which is just a change of course. You can't escape it being human. It's like we can't escape gravity when we walk out of the house. And so if we back up enough, it's not a qu. No one signs up to fall down. Oh, give me two. No. But it's inevitable. It's part of life, and we grow and learn from it. So if we back up enough, falling down over a lifetime is actually a dance. And the question is, what does your particular individual dance look like? And how can you do it better? How can you be skilled at it? And what can you keep learning from it? So the title of the book came from medieval monks in Europe. When asked how they practiced their faith, said, by falling down and getting up. And I get that. I resonate with that. And then what that made me think, as we start to look at other cultures, all cultures speak about this in some way. I then discovered that in Japan, there's a proverb that says, fall down seven, get up eight. Fall down seven, get up, eight. And then I discovered in the Hindu tradition, you know, the Upanishads, for those who aren't familiar, they're the holy anonymous texts in the Hindu tradition filled with amazing metaphors. And one of them is of a caterpillar. And if you watch how a caterpillar moves, it goes forward, it stretches forward, and then it bunches up, actually goes back a little and then goes forward. So it's bunching up and going. This is another form of falling down and getting up, going backwards and going forward. And that reminded me finally, of during my cancer journey, when I had that rib removed. I woke up right after the surgery in a room, of course, and there was this nurse hovering over me, and she says to me, get up. We're going to walk. And I said, who's going to walk now? And then she got softer, and she whispered to me, two steps forward, one step back. All of these things from all different approaches. Two step. The caterpillar. Two steps forward. What I meant to say is that in the Upanishads, that caterpillar image. They say this is the rhythm of spiritual growth, like a caterpillar. And so all of these rhythms come together. And so there is an art to falling and an art to getting up that is very personal to how we face what is ours to face and how we ask for help when we need help. And those become ingredients for resilience.

There's a profound book called the Heart of the World, about exploring the deepest gorge on the planet in the Himalayas, where only a couple explorers have ever gone. And it's allegedly where Shangri La lives. And I've done some exploring the Himalayas. Nothing as extreme as that, but the book just resonated in a really deep way with me. And there's a story in it where the explorer, a Westerner, he's. You know, they're. They're falling down in mangroves or.

Or whatever.

Whatever kind of plants are growing up there.

The.

The big ones that trip you. I've fallen over them and gotten bit by leeches, but I forget their name. And he falls down and just. He's just swearing and he's pissed. And he's walking with a local monk. And the monk falls over and gets all muddy and just stands up, starts laughing and laughing and laughing. They both fell for the same thing, like, but the results were so different about it. How would we learn how to laugh when we fall down and just be curious? I guess I'll do that one again.

Well, I think. I think being human, you know, if it's not too painful, we can laugh. And, of course, this brings up what I call faith in life. Not faith in a tradition or a person or a doctrine, but faith in life that. You know, it might be hard to be grateful for something while I'm in it, but more often than not, I'm grateful because I know I will learn something from it once I'm out of that difficult passage. And I think this is at the heart of, you know, Leonard Cohen's great song Hallelujah. And he talks in there about the broken Hallelujah. And what I think he. I mean, I didn't talk to Leonard Cohen, but this is what it says to me. Here's an image. If you're on a raft at sea and a wave comes and crashes the raft, and you're hanging to a piece of driftwood, well, that's pretty difficult for you and me. That's even tragic. And it doesn't diminish the majesty of the sea. And how do we honor both? Miracle and tragedy are in every moment. And the value of the downward of, of falling down is that we're grounded, but the value of miracle is that we're uplifted. So if we only are grounded, we can be ground down. And if we're only uplifted, we're going to transcend out of here. And so somehow one of the challenges in being human is how to allow the lift of miracle and the grounding of falling to help us be fully here, neither leaving this earth and neither being ground to dust on it. And you know, we have. The wheel of life never stops turning. And if we stop it at any one point, we have a philosophy. If you stop it on the top, oh, we're going to transcend out of here. Isn't everything wonderful? And if you stop it at the bottom now we have, you know, nihilism and existentialism and everything sucks. And you know, well, the glass, you know, that whole thing of the glass, is it half full or half empty? Well, it's always both. Yeah, it's always go back to the.

The non dualism thing, Right?

Yeah.

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