APX-VI-0017
“I used a failure as an excuse to quit rather than a signal to adjust.”
A failure is feedback. It is the story telling you something about the approach, not about whether you should keep writing. Quitting after a failure makes the failure the last word. The author revises and continues.
Your Practice
Go back to the failure. Write down exactly what went wrong, factually, without self-pity. Then write one thing you'd do differently. Then restart, with that adjustment built in. The restart doesn't erase the quit. But it overrides it.
The Architects
“The prosecution of learning may be compared to what may happen in raising a mound. If there want but one basket of earth to complete the work, and I stop, the stopping is my own work.”
Confucius, Analects, Book IX, ch. 19 (James Legge translation)