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by natch 2854 days ago
While it's important for everyone to learn that thriving past failure is an essential life skill, this post somehow came off more as a humblebrag as I read it. These are "failures" in some sense, but very high status ones. Not looking forward to the raft of copycat humblebrag posts this might inspire.
1 comments

Um, yeah part of me felt so too, but I was thinking, how else could the guy have phrased it? I mean he's at CMU in a masters program, so to us all his failures feel big, but I don't think that's how he thinks about them. To him, they're all just failures. Nothing more, really.
Sure, but rest assured if he’s human, he has other, less impressive, failures that aren’t shown. This list is carefully curated. And deliberately published. Some other options available to him, since you were wondering, would be a) refrain from posting it; b) use non-humblebrag items to make the supposed point just as effectively; c) make the point without a list; d) use known examples from history. These are all perfectly valid. If you think option a is bad, there are still options b, c, and d. And others I haven’t thought of.

However, the author gets to decide how to write their post. That’s their right, even if it annoys me. But I’m kind of surprised you think there were no other options.