These Two Sisters Want You To Fail Spectacularly

There’s a paragraph in new book Burnout: The Secret to Solving the Stress Cycle that makes you stop and think. Human behaviourist and sex educator, Emily Nagoski and her twin sister Amelia, are talking about knowing when to walk away from a job or a relationship. They say there’s an innate “quiet intuition” that tells us to move on. “Humans, especially women, have an extraordinary capacity to ignore this voice,” they write. Why? “We have been taught that letting go of a goal is the same as failing. If we ‘fail’ to achieve a goal, it’s because there is something wrong with us. We didn’t fight hard enough. We didn’t ‘believe’.”

Failure is confrontational and unnerving, so it’s no wonder many of us feel uncomfortable in its company. Unfortunately, avoiding failure – or berating ourselves when the inevitable happens – is contributing to the plague of the modern age: burnout.