Life-Ruining Mistakes?

The other day, the novelist Robin Sloan mentioned in his newsletter that he really liked the Financial Times. It seems everyone’s talking up the Financial Times lately, so I went and followed them on Instagram.

The first post in their feed was for an essay by Janan Ganesh, about how although the American self-help industry makes it seems like most mistakes can be salvaged, many are in fact unsalvageable and life-destroying. An excerpt:

The sur­prise of middle age, and the ter­ror of it, is how much of a per­son’s fate can boil down to one mis­judge­ment.

Such as? What in par­tic­u­lar should the young know? If you marry badly — or marry at all, when it isn’t for you — don’t assume the dam­age is recov­er­able. If you make the wrong career choice, and real­ise it as early as age 30, don’t count on a way back. … A big [mistake], or just an early one, can fore­close all hope of the life you wanted.

At first I found it oddly cheering (if I can’t fix my mistakes, I might as well relax and accept my circumstances), but then I found it sad. (Does my husband feel like he made a life-destroying mistake by marrying me? LMAO.) Now I’m more like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ because things can only ever go the way they go. Anyway, I’m not yet a FT subscriber, but it was a nudge.

• Financial Times
• Janan Ganesh
• life
• mistakes
• self-help

Long Tail poster boy Amazon’s tail isn’t

Long Tail poster boy Amazon’s tail isn’t as long as first reported. Oops. (But a good oops…Chris is after the truth here, not just a good story.)

• Amazon
• Chris Anderson
• mistakes
• power laws
• The Long Tail
• Wired

Scott Berkun on how to learn from your mistakes

Scott Berkun on how to learn from your mistakes. “We’re taught in school, in our families, or at work to feel guilty about failure and to do whatever we can to avoid mistakes.”

• failure
• how to
• mistakes
• scottberkun