How hypnosis & suicide teach us about the necessity of failure

Cliff Kang
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read
Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

So in a typical week, I probably listen to anywhere from about 10–25 hours of podcasts :). Every once in a while, an episode really sticks out to me. This week, it was Invisibilia’s “Future Self” episode.

My vision is to give people the opportunity to find & pursue their passions. With that said, this episode reiterated and taught me some things, helping tell the story of what good it could do, but at the same time, what the pitfalls could be.

The story starts with an underperforming school, a place where students don’t dream. Enter, a new principal that wants to instill in the students that desire for something better. Up to that point, the story isn’t particularly interesting, but how that principal decides to go about it is: .

The principal sees some promising results, like significant improvements in a student’s SAT scores, and then hypnosis starts to get used in various aspects of school life, including things like sports. The story takes an interesting turn, though, when hypnosis becomes the potential culprit behind two suicides.

Two instances of hypnosis potentially contributed to two students tragically committing suicide: the guy had a (long-shot) audition for Juilliard coming up, whereas the girl experienced a failed application to college.

Hypnosis did seem to have the desired effect of giving the kids an extraordinary drive to pursue an audacious goal. At the same time, that extremely strong desire showed an unintended consequence. The single-minded nature of hypnosis did help drive some students to success, but it also led them to feel the weight of their failures that much more.

The story leaves me with the thought that as much as it may be desirable for us to be allowed to pursue our passions, it’s just as important to understand that it’s okay to fail. How many of us are pursuing the dreams we had when we were 8 years old?

As important as it is that in success we stay humble, we need to embrace failing gracefully. It’s fully understanding that whatever situation we’re in, there are always elements that we can’t control. That both success and failure are always partly due to luck.

In the podcast series, How I Built This, Guy Raz usually asks a question along the lines of: how much of your success was due to luck? The vast majority of the entrepreneurs say that most of their success was attributed to luck. In the same way, it’s due to luck that most of us fail.

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