Reality

by TED WILD

“3 Minutes To Live 1% Happier”

Reality: Riding A Standing Coin

2023.11.28 | #38

Happy Reality Day! Here is your weekly dose of reality to help you live 1% happier↓


1 Insight From Me

The Tour De France is the most famous bicycle race in the world. A race lasts 23 days and covers a total distance of 3,500 kilometers. During the process, it passes through several European countries and climbs up and down the Alps.

So, guess how many hours the winner gap is between the first and second place?

1 hour? 3 hours? 5 hours?

In fact, the smallest win margin was only 8 seconds.

23 days, 3,500 kilometers, over mountains and ridges, the final gap was only 8 seconds.

The gap between success and failure is often very small. Most of the time we are riding on a standing coin, not knowing which side it will eventually land on.

99% of startups fail.

If you ask the bosses of the 1% successful companies how they succeeded, they will say that it was mostly luck.

This is actually not modesty, because he himself knows that if one of the 100 key decisions he made along the way was wrong, he might not be where he is today. Most decisions are made without knowing the result. Only time will give the answer.

Just work hard on every decision any go on with action. Don’t blame yourself for whatever the result.

What’s important is to learn from each experience.

Because the experience of failure is actually a more valuable asset than the experience of success.


1 Insight From Others

It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. 

Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance 

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. 

― Steve Jobs on being outed by Apple


1 Small Step To Take

“Failure Resume”

Everyone writes their most glorious success stories on their resume. But in fact, it is more valuable to try writing about your most failed experience.

What are your biggest failures in your life?

Study, work or relationship all are OK.

After you write it down, think about what you learned from your mess-ups.

If you find that you never mess up anything big, that’s actually not a good thing, because it means you rarely step out of your comfort zone. It is difficult to achieve great results without making mistakes.

PS: What does “mentally strong” mean?


Do you find this issue of Reality helpful? Leave a reply to this email, I check every reply in my inbox.

Until next week,

Ted Wild


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