Failure] quietly loses,” Halberstam writes, “and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”26 In other words, when we fail, we become free to choose what we want our actual goals and priorities to be, rather than following the expectations of others. The Laziness Lie wants us to keep being productive in areas where we’re skilled—so when we choose to stick with an activity we’re horrible at, we’re able to make a choice motivated by genuine love rather than by the external pressure to succeed.
