As you read this essay, you are aging. The older you get, the more you become an emissary from a vanished world — in my case, a world of black-and-white photographs taken by a Brownie camera, the sun bleaching the faces of the squinting subjects.
What is your strategy for getting older? Follow these handy tips, and time will be your ally.
Learn To Fail
Most of us attempt to get better at our hobbies and careers. We want to improve as tennis players, as firefighters, as sushi chefs. But we forget that failure is also a talent — often a more adaptive talent than success. Life is mainly a series of defeats that usually catch us unawares. But if you willfully undertake projects at which you’re destined to fail — designing a solar-powered rocket ship, for example — you’ll develop the strength necessary to live for years and years and years. So choose a task you’ll never do well, and start trying. (Possibly, just by dumb luck, you’ll build a solar-powered rocket ship.)
