I remember it like it was yesterday. Freshman year basketball tryouts had gone surprisingly well. I completed every pass, sank a decent percentage of my free throws, and carved out a spot as a solid,if unspectacular, bench player. I wasn’t a star, but I had made the team. Then it happened.
The runaway layup. An easy shot. And I missed. Catastrophically. Unexplainably.
I was cut the next day.
“Fail fast and fail often.”
The startup world is filled with mantras like this. In tech and entrepreneurship circles, failure has become something to chase, not avoid. And science is starting to back this up. A 2019 Nature study by Wang et al. found that among scientists and entrepreneurs, those who ultimately succeeded had actually failed more frequently than their less-successful peers. What set them apart wasn’t luck or genius, it was their ability to learn and adapt quickly after each failure.
The takeaway? Go ahead and fall flat on your face. Just don’t forget to get back up.
But the story gets more complicated. While we’ve long assumed success leads to happiness, research suggests the emotional lift from success is often short-lived. Sonja Lyubomirsky and Ed Diener, two leading voices in positive psychology, have shown that people quickly adapt to new levels of achievement. The joy fades. And, interestingly, people who’ve experienced failure sometimes report higher levels of long-term well-being than those who haven’t. Their findings suggest that durable happiness is fueled less by external wins, like trophies or titles, and more by internal sources: purpose, meaningful relationships, and personal growth.
It turns out, happiness doesn’t ride shotgun with success. Instead, it travels with something deeper: a kind of purpose that fosters connection and inner development. But how do we detach this idea from our everyday goals and ambitions? How can we pursue purpose without being consumed by the sting of failure or seduced by the thrill of success?
My suggestion: We need to reframe purpose. Let’s talk about little p purpose.
Little p purpose is about the process, not the outcome. It’s goal-agnostic. It’s the joy of doing something meaningful, regardless of whether it ends in a trophy or a rejection email. Say you dream of becoming a bestselling memoirist. That’s wonderful. But even if the book doesn’t make it onto the New York Times list, the sheer act of writing it, of shaping your story, can still be deeply fulfilling. When we focus on process over product, we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of win-or-lose thinking.
That shift can transform our lives in three powerful ways:
1. Courage. A 2019 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that courage significantly boosts life satisfaction—even more than traditional traits like optimism or resilience. Courage didn’t guarantee success, but it did lead to a greater sense of fulfillment. When we decouple success from specific outcomes and instead attach it to the act of trying, we give ourselves agency. We may not control whether we win the race, but we always control whether we show up to run.
2. Resilience. People who enjoy the process, who are driven by little p purpose, burn out less. Burnout often comes from chasing big P Purpose: lofty, rigid goals that might look impressive but feel hollow. If you’re pursuing something you don’t actually enjoy doing, even “success” can feel like failure. You might lack the skills, the resources, or the energy—and the cost of pushing through might be too high. Process-oriented people, on the other hand, build resilience because their motivation is intrinsic. They’re fueled by what they love doing, not just by what they hope to achieve.
3. Flexibility. Clinging to rigid, outcome-based goals makes us less adaptable. My basketball setback could’ve been reframed. Instead of quitting the team entirely, maybe I could’ve applied to be the equipment manager. I would have stayed close to the sport I loved, earned camaraderie, and found meaning without needing to be a top athlete. When success isn’t narrowly defined, failure doesn’t close the door. It opens new ones.
So what does this mean for how we raise and teach the next generation?
We should help young people detach from the success-failure binary. Let’s redefine success as simply having the courage to try. Real victory lies in stepping into the arena—not in the guarantee of a win, but in the willingness to take the shot.
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In this way, failure truly becomes the new success. I’m not saying we hand out trophies to everyone who runs the triathlon. But we should honor those who showed up to the starting line. Because only those who attempt the race can one day earn the podium. And those who cross the finish line with a genuine smile, regardless of their time, may be the ones who’ve truly succeeded.
Meritocracy doesn’t disappear in this worldview. Excellence still matters. But we broaden the definition of success in a way that includes courage, process, and growth.
And maybe, just maybe, we build a world that celebrates not just the best—but all those brave enough to begin.
