Graduate school is where you learn to fail.

Getting in, I was convinced I’d been admitted into my PhD program by some miracle of luck. Two years in, that luck had all but run out. My research failed to find statistical significance. Journal reviewers seemed allergic to my manuscripts. I got a general sense of “meh,” from those I shared ideas with. Four more years and a dissertation later, not much would change.

And yet here I am on the other end of it. Imperfectly fine.

Failure hurts like hell, but if we can accept it, we’re better for it.

Think of failure as a splinter: Those tiny slivers of wood we get while carelessly grazing against an unfinished surface.

Some might dream of marble houses, where they can slide gracefully across everything with scarcely a scratch.

Others barrel through the pain, denying any misstep, and get one splinter after another before the last has healed.

Most will pause, remove the little devil, and move on—ideally with a bit more caution and maybe a hardened patch of skin for the trials ahead.

Despite how normal the last response feels, our culture glorifies the delusion of invulnerability and the denial of failure implied in the first two. We reward power to those who claim to live in a world without splinters. For the past few years, I’ve wondered whether that reward system is more of a trap than it seems.

Learning to Die

I’m not a follower of Bruce Lee-related media. I had a short-lived, adolescent obsession with Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, but that was the extent of it. I did, however, come across a clip of Lee a few years ago that still sticks with me. In it, he shares the following bit of wisdom with one highly unprepared trainee:

“Like everyone else, you want to learn the way to win, but never to accept the way to lose, to accept defeat, to learn to die is to be liberated from it. So when tomorrow comes, you must free your ambitious mind, and learn the art of dying.” – As quoted by Bruce Lee Enterprises

There’s value in pushing through hard times. An ample body of research shows how perseverance is associated with positive well-being, work, and academic-related outcomes. After all, I trucked through six years of academic pain and won a doctorate for it.

In 2018, writer Dara Horn described the unsurprising trend of frightfully wealthy men never wanting to die. At least one of those men, Bryan Johnson, is quite public about that effort, sharing detailed information on his eternal life project. He and others believe immortality is possible. All human history and the failed attempts of almost every cartoon bad guy would suggest otherwise.

The desire for eternal life is not remarkable.

The belief that you can have eternal life is remarkable.

It makes a kind of sense that the extremely wealthy would think immortality possible. If you’ve won as much as you can, at least financially, why not continue winning over biological reality? They say no one escapes death and taxes, but if you’ve cheated the latter, why not the former?

Bruce Lee’s wisdom is a striking departure from this “win everything” mentality. It is also a noticeably measured perspective. Lee is not saying to “lose everything,” as much as he is saying, “You win some, you lose some. Accept this.” Taken this way, there is nothing radical in his wisdom. Rather than questioning how he came to his point, it may be worth asking how in the world anyone’s motto would be “win everything” and “I can be immortal.”

When Everything Becomes Money

Perhaps in the minds of the extremely wealthy, such wealth subsumes other kinds of success. Money can buy everything from relationships to personal fulfillment. In this grand wealth-induced delusion love, community and happiness are all products to be purchased.

Life itself becomes a product. In this delusion, with enough money, the machinery of industry and science can churn out all the supplements, cybernetic enhancements, cryogenic technology, and digital clones you need to conquer death.

It isn’t just success, broadly speaking, but financial success we’re talking about.

Other forms of achievement, like realizing your communal, creative, spiritual, or even academic dreams, don’t lead to immortality beliefs. After building the family and community they’ve worked so hard to realize, no one with a regular human income says, “I’m so proud I was able to do this. I bet I can also conquer death.”

It's common to think that extreme financial success broadens one’s world. Having the resources to travel and learn from others does expand our point of view. But perhaps the upper bounds of wealth and what it takes to get there shrink the landscape of human experience. It feels important to recognize that meaningful relationships, personal fulfillment, and eternal life exist beyond the purse. To think otherwise is to miss out on so much of what matters.

The Rewards Are Too Good

Remarking on immortality-seeking billionaires, science fiction author Ted Chiang suggested that, “Having breached the benefits of being part of society, they are now trying to detach themselves from society.” I wonder if they already have and that the reason is society itself.

In a fascinating review of the research on the class-compassion gap, psychologists Paul Piff and Jake Moskowitz find that as people gain more social status, they show fewer cooperative behaviors. In a rigged game of Monopoly, Piff shows that when people were made to feel more wealthy, they. . . weren’t great.

It's stunning to see the participants winning on video. Their body language changes and they become more excited and aggressive. It reminds me of how people act in a casino when they think they’re beating the house.

This is what I’d call the addiction cycle of winning. The rewards of winning and wealth are so great that they become replacements for everything else—human connection included. So, you keep striving and maybe you even rig the game when you can. You win more, the rewards increase, and you begin to delude yourself that everything, the world, life itself, is a game to be won and bought.

To break the cycle, you need to fail and you need to know it.

Otherwise, you’re trapped in the same delusion that the wealthy, world-conquering bad guys of anime are: That you can have and deserve eternal life. Damn the consequences.

And I’m not the only one saying society is the source of the problem. Even Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for Trump: The Art of the Deal, has written about our culture’s obsession with winning. Trump’s rampant denialism catapulted him to power and Schwartz was undoubtedly a factor in that “success”—a role he now regrets. So, when he says there’s a problem with how consumed we are with winning, he’s speaking from experience.

The Cost of Refusing to Admit You’re Wrong

Bruce Lee’s quote is about more than actual death. It’s about accepting when you’ve lost.

In my psych classes, I tell this story about a man named Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield is the notorious fraudster whose 1998 paper in The Lancet claimed a connection between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. The claims were debunked, and follow-up research found no connection between vaccines and autism. The Lancet later retracted the original paper, and Wakefield was struck from the register of the British Medical Council following an investigation.

A 2021 study estimated that Wakefield’s paper led to a monthly increase of 70 MMR cases. Wakefield maintains his anti-vaccine stance, absent any evidence.

What do we lose when we cannot stand to lose?

In Wakefield’s case, admitting error and moving forward could have prevented hundreds of cases of MMR. Had he gone back and advocated sound health advice, he might have saved lives. Yet he appears unwilling to do so. Why?

Perhaps the personal costs are too great. Perhaps the shame of admitting error is so distasteful a prospect that he’ll avoid it at all costs. But being a scientific outcast, stricken from the registry of medical professionals, and made an unfortunate case study in intro psych classes is hardly better than the impermanence of shame.

Unless one doesn’t view shame as impermanent.

A Way Out of the Shame Trap

While common knowledge would cast shame in a negative light, research suggests that this isn’t always the case. In a 2015 meta-analysis of shame research, Colin Wayne Leach and Atilla Cidam found that shame was associated with prosocial behavior like apologizing, making amends, and greater cooperation during social dilemmas. But this link was strongest when people held views of shame as reparable.

Why bother admitting you’re wrong if it’ll forever brand you as shameful or fundamentally and permanently flawed? Maybe denial is all you have. That, and a few million conspiracy adherents to feed your ego.

Maybe this doesn’t describe Wakefield—I’m not his therapist. But I don’t doubt that some refuse to acknowledge bad behavior because they see no way out. I don’t doubt that others find any admission of wrongdoing an affront so egregious that they’d rather watch the world burn. The power granted to denial is too great.

Power, status, and how we reward each are at the core of what keeps us from admitting that some goals are beyond us or that we are at fault. The incentive for never giving in is too great for some, and so they never, as Bruce Lee says, “learn to die.”

I’m not some Wakefield apologist. But there is something existentially limiting, and more than a little sad, about the narrowing of the kind of person one feels they can be. Even if you think he deserves no nuanced view of himself, if he felt free to admit fraud, lives might literally be saved. And if our billionaires realized the pointlessness of immortality and directed their funds elsewhere? Perhaps, more lives saved.

A Culture of Growth

You cannot have everything, and it is ok to admit you are wrong.

Yeah, I probably read too much into Lee’s quote. I’m no Bruce Lee scholar. I just found some words that helped me make sense of a difficult time in my life. I don’t imagine Lee was talking about billionaires, games of rigged Monopoly, denialist presidents, or medical fraudsters.

But his words help me formalize longstanding issues I have with modern cultures of infallibility. These cultures glorify winning at all costs, ownership, and pwnership. They are the cultures that tear you down for getting it wrong and build you up for never admitting defeat. They are the cultures fed by modern addiction algorithms, gotcha moments, and mockery.

I came out of graduate school an educator, not a prolific researcher. As an educator, you learn quickly how wrong students can be. But you do not mock them for it. The classroom is not a contest of power and wits. You learn how wrong you, as a teacher, can be. And yeah, maybe they mock you for it. But you take it, admit the error, and grow. You do this because you need to show them it’s okay to fail sometimes.

The part about the Bruce Lee quote that really gets to me is his idea that learning to die is to be liberated from it. Again, I’m no Lee scholar, so take this with a grain of salt. But it feels similar to the kind of culture that I, and so many educators, strive to build in our classrooms.

While not without controversy, psychologist Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindsets has been seminal in our understanding of how to create these cultures. To do so means creating a place where you are free to be wrong. There are consequences for being wrong, yes. But those consequences are never mockery and never permanent. Not if you take the next step to acknowledge the mistake and change. It’s a culture of shared growth. At least, I hope it is.

So much of society is founded on the worship of winning. When we treat winning as everything, dying seems like the end. One splinter, and it’s all over. So, you tiptoe around timber or deny any injury.

The truth is that assuming it’s not one hell of a splinter, life goes on. And if it's actual death that we’re talking about, life still goes on.

Accepting our death is a sort of collective liberation because in accepting our own death and failure, we see how much more life exists beyond our own. This is easier said than done, but we can build a culture where we aren’t simply praising the win, but how we deal with the loss. Therein lies real freedom.