Faking Equanimity

It’s fine if it works, it’s fine if it doesn’t.

Ho gaya toh theek hai, nahi hua phir bhi theek hai.

This sounds like a very healthy attitude.

Not to let yourself be attached to the outcome, to be OK either way, whether you succeed or fail.

I’ve come across similar sentiments quite a few times now in different contexts.

And every time, I’ve always felt something off and annoying about it, though I couldn’t exactly say why.

It’s hard to write precisely about it because this is very close to a healthy approach to things, and yet somewhere it’s also harmful.

It’s harder to see why if you think of it from a first-person point of view, where you’re the one who believes this.

It seems like equanimity, acceptance of any outcome.

Try looking at it from a second-person point of view, where you’re hearing it from someone.

If it’s really such a healthy approach, it should still be good, regardless of whether it’s you or someone else who believes in it.

If you were investing your money in a company, and the founder tells you that ‘it’s fine if it works, it’s fine if it doesn’t’ – it probably shouldn’t thrill you to hear that.

Consider a coach training an athlete who has the same mindset towards his game, or a tutor teaching someone with this attitude.

Why would they bother wasting their time and effort, when the person they’re trying to help doesn’t care much about it? At the very least, they’d probably have the same half-hearted attitude toward their job.

I think this is what you tell yourself when – firstly, you’re not really trying very hard, and secondly, when you want to preserve your image in front of others.

Not Trying

When you don’t try hard, this might help you feel better about not putting in more effort.

It’s very easy to believe this too.

‘It’s OK if you don’t make it.’

‘Since it’s OK if you don’t make it, it’s also OK if you don’t try hard either’

These statements don’t follow each other at all. Making peace with an outcome doesn’t imply not doing your best to avoid it.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to convince yourself they go together.

So it’s a short and easy step from telling yourself that since it’s OK if you don’t make it, it’s also OK if you don’t try very hard.

Not trying hard makes it more likely you won’t make it, but since failing is OK, anything that leads to that outcome would also seem to be OK.

It’s poor reasoning, but more than good enough to convince someone if they’re eager to believe.

There’s also a more useful purpose for this attitude – it’s a good face-saving tactic.

It preserves your image both in front of yourself, and in front of others.

Saving Face

You ‘pre-empt’ failure.

More than just consider the possibility of failure, you expect it from yourself and you try to ensure that others expect it from you as well.

Perhaps it hurts less that way if you actually do fail, because you remind yourself that you considered it acceptable and also expected.

Acceptable meaning it’s OK, and expected meaning it was the most likely scenario.

You expected something, and that thing was acceptable to you, and then it actually happened – so why should it hurt?

This saves face in front of others because you can always try to diminish the magnitude of your failure, and pretend you don’t care, since after all, you said it’s OK if you fail.

Making it sound like you’re indifferent to what you’re working towards is a good face-saving tactic, like a player who says he wasn’t trying very hard after he loses.

It also saves your self-image, your opinion of yourself, because again, you can always make the excuse that you didn’t try very hard, and tell yourself that if you’d really wanted to, you’d have done it.

In a way, you try to remove your skin from the game – if you succeed, you’ll take the benefits, if you fail, it’s still OK.

Like tossing a coin and trying to win no matter what the outcome.

Failure Aversion

Probably the worst way to approach anything is with resignation.

Where you don’t even put any effort and give up before trying because you already believe you can’t succeed.

This ‘if it works, that’s fine, if it doesn’t, that’s also fine’ attitude is much better than resignation, but it’s still not a great approach.

You can’t get something without having some skin in the game.

You can’t hedge every bet, you can’t rig it so you win whatever the toss of the coin.

I think the value of knowing this is that if you go in with such an approach you do yourself an injustice and you severely diminish your chances.

You do yourself an injustice because you say that it’s OK if it happens and it’s OK if it doesn’t.

If someone really believed that, then ask the question – why bother at all?

After all your effort, if you succeed, you’ll still just be OK.

Which you already are, according to your own standards, so what are you working towards?

Running in a full circle to come back to the same point.

In essence, wasting your time.

The very fact that you’re working to achieve something indicates it has some value for you, otherwise you’d just put up your feet and sit at home.

So why pretend it isn’t very important to you?

One reason might be that, for all the talk of lionizing failure, no one likes to fail.

And if you let people know that you’re invested in something, that you’re committing yourself to working on something, and especially that it matters to you – you open yourself up to potential ridicule if you fail.

Thus this hypocrisy of doing something, yet pretending to be in it half-heartedly, so that it’s easy to dissociate from the outcome in case of failure yet revel in success if it comes about.

Failure itself perhaps isn’t as bad as what you might think it says about you.

It’s when you make the failure permanent, pervasive and personal that issues arise.

Permanent – that it’s a stain which can’t be washed away. You lose a match, and tell yourself it’s not that you lost that day, but that you always lose.

Pervasive – it affects everything about you, not just this specific thing. It’s the belief that failure says something about you as a person – so a person who loses a tennis tournament is a loser, not simply at tennis, but a loser as a person. It’s not one, but two wrong leaps – losing a match to defining yourself a loser as a tennis player to defining yourself a loser as a human.

Personal – that it reflects on you, it implies you’re not good enough. Not that you had an off day, or your opponent was better, but that you’re a bad tennis player.

None of these are true.

Avoiding Excuses

There’s no disputing the fact that it’s OK if things don’t work out.

The point is not that this is a wrong belief.

It’s that this is not the first thing you’d want to be on your mind when you think of anything you’re working towards.

If the first thing that comes to your mind is an excuse, that it’s OK if it doesn’t work out, then what expectations are you going in with?

All you do is increase the odds that you will fail because you use the idea that failure is OK as a crutch, constantly relying on it to support yourself.

This clearly doesn’t mean that you should consider it the end of the world if things don’t pan out according to plan.

It’s obvious to anyone that if you don’t land a job or don’t clear a test or you face a rejection, the universe won’t implode, the planets won’t collapse, and you won’t be swallowed up by the earth.

It’s a misconception to play up failure to make it seem like the end of the world.

But it’s also not a great idea to normalize failure to the extent it’s the first thing you think about, so you’re thoughts aren’t on what you’re doing but on how you’ll cover up if you fail.

Perhaps it helps to think of it differently.

‘It’s OK if things don’t work out‘ – this is not a crutch you use for support all the time, but an emergency kit that you recall when something goes wrong.

If you start believing that it’s all the same whether you fail or succeed not only do you reduce effort and increase the likelihood of failure, you also don’t learn when you fail.

What’s there to learn from a situation that you consider OK and one that you even anticipated?

Differentiating Equanimity

The idea behind ‘It’s fine if it works, it’s fine if it doesn’t‘ sounds like equanimity, or Nishkama Yoga, of not having attachment to the fruits of action.

But this is not the same, for two reasons.

Equanimity is about making peace with the outcome after giving your best. It’s not about feigning indifference to what you’re doing and using that as an excuse to not try.

And equanimity is not something you do to put on a show for others so you can save face in front of them.

It’s simply about deciding what matters to you and doing what you can about that, and not worrying about what’s not in your hands. It isn’t a performance done to make an impression on anyone.

Finding an Optimum

At one extreme you have the idea that failure is the end of the world and everything depends on success.

At the other you have something of a failure fetish, that failure is great and wonderful.

That both extremes aren’t reliable is to be expected.

But simply taking the midpoint isn’t necessarily optimal – just like minimizing errors works not by taking midpoints but using least squares.

Similarly, making out success and failure both to be the same, both to be OK comes with pitfalls too.

The optimal solution lies away from the midpoint, rather than at the midpoint.

Which is to be expected, because you choose to work towards something if you think it has some value for you – so it’s pointless to pretend like failing to achieve it and achieving it are equal.

If they were equal, you’d never bother, because you could fail without any effort – there has to be some additional value to justify the effort.

So failing isn’t the end of the world, but making it out to be expected and perfectly normal is wrong too – it’s not tranquility, but cowardice and hypocrisy.