“Sometimes you win, sometimes you win later.” - Richard Seidl
One of the teachers of my adult life is Gaston Florin. In an improv workshop he once said a sentence that stuck with me: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.” A good attitude for improv. Because there is no losing there in the classic sense. A scene tips over, an idea doesn’t land, someone completely misreads the other player’s offer. And then? Then the scene goes on. The mistake gets picked up, played with, becomes an offer itself. What looked like failure a moment ago is the best twist of the evening two minutes later. I took the sentence and turned it a bit further, and it has stayed with me ever since: Sometimes you win, sometimes you win later.
Lately that sentence keeps coming back to me. Because right now I keep running into its opposite. In projects, in teams, in conversations. Quitting is in the air. Quiet Quitting. Plans that quietly fall asleep. Initiatives that get buried after the second setback. Transformations that get shut down as “unsuccessful” after six months. The refactoring that never makes it past the prototype. The agile way of working that shrinks to fair-weather agility at the first headwind and disappears completely at the second. I don’t want to judge all of this across the board, some of it is reasonable. But I sense a basic mood, a kind of collective shrug: what’s the point anyway.
Yet the word failure deserves a second look. We talk about failure as if it were a state. Something that happens to you like bad weather. The project failed. The idea failed. I failed. Stamped. Only: who actually issues that stamp? There is no authority that at some point objectively declares it to be finally over. That moment exists in exactly one place: in the decision to stop. Failure is not a state. Failure is a decision. As long as I keep going, I have not failed. I am right in the middle of it.
Of course, not everything is worth pushing through. There are plenty of dead horses still being ridden because we have already invested so much. So the more interesting question is: where is it worth continuing? I don’t think there is an objective “worth it” you could measure like test coverage. Whether something is worth it emerges in the description we make of it. The same endeavor is a bottomless pit for one person and, for another, a learning field that is just starting to bear fruit. Both are right. If you are looking for proof that sticking with it will pay off in the end, you are looking in the wrong place. That proof never exists in advance.
What helps me personally instead are three small questions. Not: why isn’t it working? I know that question well, it only makes the problem bigger and bigger. But: how do I notice that things are still moving? What would be the next small step? And the most important one: am I really, really still up for this?
And yes, sometimes the answer after that is still: I quit. That is perfectly fine. But then it is a decision I make with a clear head, not a fate that befalls me. Whoever decides can decide differently, today, in a month, in a year. Whoever declares themselves a failure has forbidden themselves to keep playing.
On the improv stage, a scene is only over when the players end it. Not when the first idea goes wrong. I believe the same holds beyond the stage: Sometimes you win. Sometimes you win later.
