I’ve been thinking a lot about failure and hard work lately. And the more I sit with it, the more I suspect that a lot of us are suffering more than we need to.
Maybe that’s personal. Maybe I am suffering more than I need to. But I don’t think it’s just me.
We talk about hard work and failing fast like they’re universal virtues. Like effort itself is the moral high ground. But in that conversation, we often strip out intention. We strip out thought. We strip out the far more uncomfortable question of where our effort is being applied.
So you get people spending decades trying to become excellent at the wrong thing. Fish, patiently learning how to walk on land. And yes, with enough grinding, they do improve. They wobble less. They last longer. They even get applause for their resilience.
But they are still fish.
I’m not arguing against effort. There is no life worth living that doesn’t demand work. There is no meaningful contribution that comes without friction. Doing things matters. Trying things matters.
What I’m questioning is the idea that more effort is always the answer.
Because effort in the wrong arena doesn’t fail loudly. That’s the problem. It produces progress. Small wins. Incremental improvement. Just enough feedback to keep you locked in. And that progress becomes the justification for staying.
You tell yourself: if I’m improving, it must be right.
But improvement is not the same thing as growth.
Most people never pause long enough to interpret the data they’re gathering about themselves. They stay in perpetual exploration mode, mistaking motion for discovery. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Calling it discipline. Calling it character. Calling it growth.
At some point, especially later in life, that kind of suffering stops being necessary. It becomes optional. And worse, it becomes self-inflicted.
I think a lot of adult pain comes from people repeatedly choosing games they cannot truly win. Not because they’re incapable, but because the game itself isn’t designed for them. With enough work, they can become competent. With enough time, even impressive. But excellence always feels just out of reach. Effort never quite compounds. Energy never quite returns.
And then comes the mental gymnastics.
“You’re not going to be the best anyway.”
“Most people are average.”
“Hard work is what matters.”
All of that can be true. And still miss the point.
The issue isn’t whether you’ll be the best in the world. The issue is whether you’re in an arena where your kind of excellence is even possible.
What makes this especially difficult is how the mind works. At least how my mind works. Everything connects to everything. Every failure can be reframed. Every discomfort can be spiritualised. Every signal can be explained away. You can build an entire philosophy that keeps you stuck.
So I’ve been trying to anchor myself to a simpler belief: that every design has an intended purpose. And that things only truly make sense within the context of that design.
Early in life, you don’t know what that design is. So yes, you explore. You work hard. You try things. You gather data. Pain here is tuition. It’s unavoidable.
But exploration has a job. And once that job is done, staying there becomes avoidance.
At some point, the question shifts from “Can I get better at this?” to “Is this what I am actually meant to be good at?”
That’s a harder question. Because answering it means closing doors. It means grieving identities. It means admitting that some effort was misdirected. And grief feels worse than fatigue.
So people choose fatigue.
I see this when I look at my daughter. It’s obvious, if you pay attention, where energy flows naturally. What lights her up. What drains her. Design signals are always present. Most of us just grew up in environments that didn’t know how to read them.
So we learned to override ourselves. And then we called that maturity.
I don’t believe all pain is unnecessary. But I do believe most of it is. Especially the kind that comes from refusing to step back and choose the right arena.
Hard work should be costly. It shouldn’t feel debasing.
Effort should sharpen you, not slowly erase you.
Picking the right arena doesn’t guarantee a good life. But picking the wrong one almost guarantees a quiet resentment that looks like discipline on the outside and exhaustion on the inside.
That’s the trade most people are making.
And then calling it virtue.
There’s another reason it’s so easy to override our own design. And it has less to do with individual weakness and more to do with how influence actually works.
I think we live under what I’d call the minority rule, to borrow Ari Berman's term.
A very small group of people, usually the most visible, the most celebrated, the most spectacular, end up setting the narrative for what a “successful life” looks like. Not because they are representative, but because they are seen.
And humans mistake visibility for validity.
At different points in history, this (visible) minority has changed. At a global level, it was movie stars. Then it was athletes. Now it’s content creators, influencers and Entrepreneurs. The faces shift, but the mechanism stays the same.
There have always been people with immense power and wealth who remained invisible for decades. Builders, owners, operators. But they don’t satisfy our appetite for spectacle. So they don’t become the template.
Instead, the visible minority becomes the ideal. And everyone else starts unconsciously climbing a pyramid they didn’t choose.
We study the lives of the few. We internalise their stories. Their suffering becomes proof of virtue. Their grind becomes a prerequisite. Their outcomes become the standard.
And because they’re rewarded, at least in the image we’re shown, it starts to feel irresponsible to believe there might be another way.
In the face of such glaring evidence, choosing alignment over imitation feels naïve. Even delusional.
This is how people end up overriding their own design. Not because they hate themselves, but because the culture keeps presenting a very narrow slice of humanity as the universal destination.
I’ve been thinking about this through the metaphor of waves.
There’s a popular idea, I think Virgil Abloh said something like it, that the world creates waves and you can either take your board and ride them or get crushed by them. And that’s true, to a point. Riding waves can create massive momentum.
But here’s the part that gets left out.
Not everyone is built to surf every wave.
And more importantly, waves don’t appear out of nowhere.
They’re caused.
By deeper forces. Structural shifts. Technological changes. Cultural tensions. Economic incentives. Long-running currents that exist whether or not anyone is paying attention.
Waves are just the visible surface.
For someone like me, who doesn’t always have the emotional appetite to constantly chase spectacle, the alternative isn’t doom, although it can feel like that sometimes. It’s depth.
If I want to ride a wave, I need to understand what creates it. If I want to build something enduring, I need to pay attention to the forces beneath and above the water.
Those forces are slower. Less glamorous. More predictable. And far more durable than the waves themselves.
The minority rule pulls our eyes upward, toward spectacle. Toward the loudest examples. Toward lives that were never meant to be templates.
And the cost of that pull is insidious turmoil. People exhausting themselves trying to become someone else. People mistaking imitation for destiny.
Maybe a lot of the suffering we normalize isn’t noble at all. Maybe it’s just the byproduct of confusing visibility with truth, and waves with the ocean.
And maybe the work, real work, is learning when to ignore the wave entirely and study what’s causing the tide.
Or maybe I'm just too lazy to do real Hard Work.