You must learn to live with the fact that you will make mistakes—lots of mistakes—and that you will learn from them. Mistakes are in fact a great source of strength; making mistakes is analogous to building muscle in athletic training. Think about it for a minute: how does an athlete get stronger? By pushing to the point of failure. You do, say, three pull-ups and fail on the fourth. The body point of failure. You do, say, three pull-ups and fail on the fourth. The body adapts and gets stronger and the next time you can do four pull-ups, and fail on the fifth. The next time out you can do five pull-ups, and fail on the sixth, and so on.

His instincts told him that each person would learn best how to improve his performance if he could see, in slow motion, what his own personal versions of excellence looked like. Really great performance often happens in a state of flow, such that we’re barely conscious of what we’re doing—Michael Jordan used to watch himself in post-game highlights and shake his head, saying, “Wow, I did that?

Even when I ran my bar I followed the same policy. A lot of customers came to the bar. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and said he’d come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it the other way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten didn’t like my bar. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders.

Athletes in general possess a relatively enlightened understanding of failure’s relationship to success. As Canadian ice hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky famously said, “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.

Mastery in any field requires a willingness to actually learn something from the many mistakes you will necessarily make. When Tanitoluwa Adewumi, a ten-year-old in New York, became the United States’ newest national chess master, the boy’s words, like his title, were well beyond his age: “I say to myself that I never lose, that I only learn. Because when you lose, you have to make a mistake to lose that game. So, you learn from that mistake, and so you learn [overall]. So losing is the way of winning for yourself.