In Praise of Falling Short

Hello readers, welcome to another edition of Think About It.

Firstly, apologies for the unannounced break. My schedule has tightened up a bit, and it’s going to remain like that for a while. That’s why I’m making this newsletter fortnightly for the time being. It’s a sensible thing to do because I do not want to make any compromise with the quality and length of the newsletter.

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With that being said, today I want to talk about setbacks. All of us have faced some form of setback. No one is immune to it. And yet, we spend most of our time talking about the "W."

Success becomes a public performance, an identity, a way of proving that we are worth listening to. There’s nothing bad or wrong in it. But it has been rightly said that we learn little from it.

Setbacks, on the other hand, are quietly pushed aside. They are rarely talked about. It’s because they make us uncomfortable. So, we disguise them, reframe them, or rush past them as if they were a temporary illness rather than an essential part of being human.

What we are missing is that failure is something to be understood. It’s not a thing to be ashamed of, and we shouldn’t just forget it, certainly not before learning something from it.

To understand it better, let’s turn to the brilliant mind of Kahlil Gibran — the Lebanese poet and philosopher best known for The Prophet — who explores this subject beautifully in his poem “Defeat”.

Let’s see what Gibran might be trying to teach us about the strange dignity of falling short.

In the very beginning, the poet personifies Defeat. So, it’s not a defeat in a general sense, but it’s his own defeat. 

Then he defines what Defeat actually is: "my solitude and my aloofness." 

Gibran sees defeat in a non-conventional sense. It is what separates him from the crowd and distances him from collective belief. That’s in the next line, he writes his Defeat feels ‘sweeter’ to him than all the success.

This opening reframes failure as a private kind of freedom. Gibran paints it as something uncorrupted by praise, expectation, or imitation.

You’ll see that in each stanza, Gibran personifies Defeat and then redefines it.

Here, he redefines Defeat as self-knowledge and defiance. He wants us to realise that these two things are related. Knowing oneself truly often requires one to face his failures and defy what others expect of them.

What he says next might seem cliché, but it’s true. Setbacks keep the hunger alive. We have seen countless examples of people who were determined to win after they were defeated. 

I watch a lot of sports, and one thing that I have often noticed is: teams that become champions get a bit complacent or perhaps overconfident in the next season. That’s why they fail to win the title again.

In Gibran’s words, they got “trapped by withering laurels.”

The last two lines are a paradox. They capture the strange liberation of being misunderstood. It is when one no longer performs for approval or has an expectation to fulfil. The poet believes that once you've won, you have to maintain that identity, defend that position, live up to that achievement. The crown becomes a kind of prison.

Again, the same repetition. Now, Defeat is shining sword and shield. Notice the imagery this conveys: it’s both a weapon and a protector. 

Then Defeat has eyes. And those eyes are saying something. Gibran presents three devastating insights:

"To be enthroned is to be enslaved" - What he means by that is when you reach the peak of success, you're now trapped by that position. The crowned head is bound by duty and expectation. This is when an individual has to maintain a reputation and expectations to fulfil.

"And to be understood is to be leveled down" - This is brilliant and unsettling at the same time. When people understand you, they simplify you. That means you are reduced to certain categories or labels. Understanding is a kind of intellectual conquest. To be understood is to be flattened into something comprehensible and therefore smaller than you actually are.

"And to be grasped is but to reach one's fullness / And like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed" - Here, the poet compares being understood with a ripe fruit. He’s saying that when you're fully understood (grasped), you lose your mystery and vitality. The ripe fruit, once complete, falls. The unripe one continues to grow. So defeat, by keeping him incomplete, keeps him alive.

The intimacy between the poet and his Defeat deepens. Now, it’s his “bold companion”. It’s no less than having a bestie. 

And you share everything with your bestie. So does the poet. Everything — “my songs and my cries and my silences” — is shared with Defeat. 

Then Gibran moves into more mystical imagery: wings, seas, and mountains. All these represent struggle and transcendence.

These images suggest that Defeat has access to realities that success cannot touch. Success keeps you on the surface, dealing with the visible and explainable. Defeat takes you into deeper and stranger territories.

Then he speaks as one who has realised that only through pain does he access the full terrain of his soul. He describes his inner landscape as “steep and rocky,” which is difficult to navigate. Only his Defeat can do it. 

The final stanza pulses with energy. Defeat is now “deathless courage”. That sounds like an oxymoron. How can defeat be courage? Because it takes more courage to embrace failure than to chase success.

There are multiple lessons that the poet shows us:

“You and I shall laugh together with the storm” - They face and embrace any struggle together. And they find joy in it.

“And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,” - This is my favourite line from the poem. Here, Gibran is telling us to let go of all the things that hold us back in the most poetic way. A lot of things have to ‘die’ in us. That’s how we can grow and become more resilient. It can be habits, beliefs, fears, illusions, or your older self.

"And we shall stand in the sun with a will" - The poet is not hiding away at all. Instead, he is intentionally standing with his Defeat.

Then the final line is like a mic drop moment. Defeat makes you fearless and ungovernable. When a person no longer fears loss, they become truly free. Hence, dangerous to any power that depends on obedience or approval.

Now, here's something for you to consider:
When you think of the moments that shaped you the most, how many of them were victories and how many were the defeats you once wanted to forget?

That’s all for today. I’ll see you in the next edition.

Until then

Stay curious

Zaid