The Finnish Day of Failure: Why October 13th Should Be Your Most Important Holiday

On October 13th, 2025, something remarkable will happen across Finland.

While most of the world celebrates successes and achievements, Finns will gather to share their failures, setbacks, and spectacular crashes.

It’s called the Day of Failure (Epäonnistumisen päivä), and it might be the most important cultural innovation of our time—one that could revolutionize how we approach success in our increasingly fragile, participation-trophy world.

I recently received my blue belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu after two years of training, and while people congratulated me on my “success,” I found myself explaining something that most couldn’t understand: I felt like I still had mountains to climb before truly earning that belt.

For over two years, I’d been systematically crushed, submitted, and outmaneuvered by people bigger, stronger, and younger than me.

At 60 years old, 5’2”, and 120 pounds, my journey to blue belt wasn’t about dominating anyone—it was about learning to survive, breathe, and suck a little less each day.

This perspective on failure as fuel for growth isn’t just a personal quirk or generational difference from growing up in the Boomer/Gen X “tough it out” era of the 1970s and 80s.

It’s a fundamental understanding that separates those who achieve lasting success from those who remain perpetually stuck.

The Finnish Day of Failure represents something our success-obsessed culture desperately needs: the recognition that failure isn’t the opposite of success—it’s the raw material from which success is built.

The Cultural Disease of Failure Avoidance

We live in an era of unprecedented failure avoidance.

• Children receive participation trophies for showing up.
• Social media algorithms show us only curated successes.
• Business culture promotes “failing fast” but rarely celebrates the messy, uncomfortable reality of actual failure.

We’ve created a generation that expects linear progress and views setbacks as personal indictments rather than educational opportunities.

This failure-phobic culture produces adults who are remarkably fragile when confronted with real challenges.

They avoid difficult tasks that might result in failure, quit at the first sign of struggle, and interpret normal setbacks as evidence they’re not cut out for challenging pursuits.

They develop what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset”—the belief that abilities are static rather than developable through effort and failure.

The result is a population that remains perpetually stuck at beginner levels across multiple domains of life.

They start fitness programs but quit when progress slows.

They begin learning new skills but abandon them when competence doesn’t come quickly.

They avoid career challenges that might expose their limitations.

They choose relationships and environments that confirm their existing capabilities rather than expand them.

The Finnish Philosophy: Failure as Teacher

Finland’s Day of Failure emerged from a profound cultural insight: in a rapidly changing world, the ability to fail well becomes more valuable than the ability to succeed consistently.

Finnish culture has long embraced what they call “sisu”—a concept that roughly translates to perseverance through adversity, but goes deeper to encompass the idea that struggle itself builds character and capability.

The Day of Failure institutionalizes this wisdom.

• Students present their worst projects.
• Business leaders share their most spectacular failures.
• Entrepreneurs discuss the ventures that crashed and burned.

The goal isn’t self-flagellation or false humility—it’s systematic extraction of learning from setbacks that most cultures prefer to hide or forget.

This approach recognizes several crucial truths about failure that our success-obsessed culture misses:

Failure Provides Higher-Quality Information

Success often masks problems.

When things go well, it’s difficult to separate skill from luck, effective strategy from favorable circumstances.

Success can reinforce behaviors that worked in specific contexts but won’t transfer to new situations. You might succeed despite poor fundamentals, creating false confidence in ineffective approaches.

Failure, conversely, provides unambiguous feedback.

When my guard gets passed in BJJ, when a submission attempt fails, when I get swept or taken down, the feedback is immediate and specific.

There’s no ambiguity about what went wrong, no opportunity to rationalize poor performance as acceptable. Failure strips away ego and forces confrontation with reality.

Failure Builds Anti-Fragility

Nassim Taleb’s concept of “anti-fragility” describes systems that actually get stronger under stress.

Human beings possess this capacity, but only if they’re regularly exposed to manageable failures that force adaptation without causing complete breakdown.

My two years of getting “smashed” on the BJJ mats wasn’t just about learning techniques—it was about building psychological resilience.

Each tap-out, each failed escape attempt, each moment of being controlled by someone better built tolerance for discomfort and uncertainty.

Over time, what initially felt overwhelming became manageable, then routine, then educational.

Failure Reveals Hidden Assumptions

We operate based on mental models—assumptions about how the world works, what strategies are effective, and what outcomes we can expect.

Success often reinforces these models, even when they’re partially incorrect. Failure forces us to examine and update our assumptions.

Every time I thought I understood a position or technique in BJJ, subsequent failures revealed gaps in my understanding.

What I thought was a secure guard could be passed with techniques I’d never seen.

Submissions I thought I understood could be escaped in ways I hadn’t considered.

Failure became the mechanism for updating and refining my mental models.

The Biochemistry of Productive Failure

Recent neuroscience research reveals why failure can be more educationally valuable than success.

When we encounter unexpected outcomes—especially negative ones—our brains release norepinephrine and dopamine in patterns that enhance memory consolidation and pattern recognition.

Dr. Alison Preston’s research at the University of Texas demonstrates that prediction errors (when reality doesn’t match expectations) create optimal conditions for learning.

The emotional discomfort of failure actually signals our brains to pay attention and encode the experience more deeply than routine successes.

This explains why my BJJ failures were often more memorable and instructive than occasional successes.

When a technique worked exactly as expected, my brain treated it as confirmation of existing knowledge.

When it failed spectacularly, my brain flagged the experience as important new information requiring integration.

The Generational Divide: Resilience vs. Fragility

There’s truth to the generational perspective that those of us born in the 1960s experienced different cultural attitudes toward failure and struggle.

We grew up being told “life isn’t fair, deal with it” rather than having obstacles removed or difficulties cushioned.

This wasn’t necessarily superior parenting, but it did create different psychological frameworks for interpreting setbacks.

However, this isn’t about generational superiority—it’s about recognizing that certain approaches to failure and struggle produce more resilient, capable individuals regardless of when they were born.

The Finnish Day of Failure represents an intentional cultural intervention to recreate some of these benefits in a more supportive, systematic way.

The Participation Trophy Problem

The well-intentioned movement to protect children’s self-esteem through participation trophies and grade inflation created an unintended consequence: it divorced reward from performance and effort from outcome.

Children began expecting recognition simply for showing up, rather than understanding that meaningful rewards come from overcoming challenges and learning from failures.

This conditioning creates adults who interpret normal setbacks as evidence that the system is unfair rather than signals that greater effort or different strategies are required.

They develop external locus of control—the belief that outcomes are primarily determined by factors outside their influence rather than by their own choices and efforts.

The Social Media Amplification

Social media platforms exacerbate failure avoidance by creating carefully curated highlight reels that make everyone else’s life appear effortlessly successful.

People see others’ achievements without witnessing the failures, struggles, and setbacks that preceded them.

This creates unrealistic expectations about what normal progress looks like.

The result is that people interpret their own normal struggles as evidence they’re uniquely incompetent rather than recognizing struggle as the universal price of growth and development.

The BJJ Metaphor: Lessons from the Mat

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu provides a nearly perfect arena for understanding productive failure.

Unlike many activities where failure can be hidden or rationalized, BJJ provides immediate, unambiguous feedback.

You either escape the submission or you tap out.

You either maintain your position or you get swept.

There’s no participation trophy for trying hard.

The Humility Curriculum

Every BJJ practitioner, regardless of natural ability or previous athletic experience, goes through what practitioners call “the humility curriculum.”

For months or years, you get systematically defeated by people who understand the leverage, timing, and techniques you haven’t yet learned.

This isn’t hazing or poor instruction—it’s the only way to build genuine competence in a complex skill domain.

My blue belt doesn’t represent mastery or even competence by most measures.

As I often tell people, I just suck a little less than I did two years ago.

Purple belts are happy to demonstrate this reality on a regular basis.

But that perspective—understanding myself as perpetually developing rather than having “arrived”—is precisely what makes continued growth possible.

The Survival Focus

For my first two years, my primary focus wasn’t on submissions, sweeps, or dominant positions.

It was on surviving—learning to stay calm under pressure, breathe when being crushed, and think clearly while being controlled by someone more skilled.

These seem like minimal goals, but they’re actually foundational skills that enable everything else.

This survival focus taught me that progress in complex domains isn’t always visible from the outside.

While others might see stagnation, internal development was happening constantly.

I was building the psychological and physical infrastructure necessary for more advanced techniques.

The Long Game Perspective

BJJ forces you to adopt a long-term perspective on development.

Techniques that seem simple take months to execute reliably under pressure.

Concepts that make intellectual sense can require tens of thousands of repetitions to become instinctive.

There are no shortcuts, no hacks, no ways to accelerate the process significantly.

This long-game perspective is increasingly rare in our instant-gratification culture.

Most people expect rapid progress and quit when development plateaus or slows. BJJ teaches that mastery is measured in years and decades, not weeks and months.

Implementing the Failure Philosophy

The Finnish Day of Failure isn’t just about celebrating setbacks—it’s about systematically extracting value from them.

This requires specific practices and mindset shifts that can be implemented regardless of cultural context.

Failure Analysis Protocols

Instead of quickly moving past failures, develop systematic approaches for analyzing them:

What specifically went wrong? Avoid vague explanations like “I wasn’t good enough” in favor of specific observations about what actions led to negative outcomes.

What assumptions were revealed to be incorrect? Identify the mental models or expectations that reality contradicted.

What would you do differently with current knowledge? This isn’t about self-recrimination but about updating strategies based on new information.

What systematic weaknesses does this reveal? Look for patterns across multiple failures that suggest areas requiring focused development.

Failure Documentation

Keep records of significant failures and setbacks.

Most people have detailed records of their successes but vague memories of their failures.

This creates a distorted view of the development process and makes it difficult to learn from patterns across multiple setbacks.

Document not just what went wrong, but your emotional responses, the assumptions that were challenged, and the lessons you extracted.

This creates a personal database of learning that becomes increasingly valuable over time.

Failure Sharing

Find communities or relationships where failure can be shared without judgment.

The shame associated with failure often prevents the reflection and analysis necessary for learning.

Creating safe spaces for discussing setbacks removes this barrier and allows for collective learning.

This doesn’t mean complaining or seeking sympathy, but rather treating failures as interesting problems worthy of analysis and discussion.

The Compound Returns of Failure

The Finnish Day of Failure recognizes something that our success-obsessed culture misses: the compound returns of learning from failure far exceed the short-term satisfaction of avoiding setbacks.

People who develop comfort with failure and systems for learning from it build capabilities that accelerate over time.

Increased Risk Tolerance

As you become more comfortable with failure, you become willing to attempt more challenging goals and take more calculated risks.

This expanded range of action creates more opportunities for significant achievements that risk-averse individuals never encounter.

Faster Learning Cycles

When failure becomes educational rather than traumatic, you can iterate more rapidly.

Instead of spending energy avoiding or recovering from setbacks, you can focus on extracting lessons and implementing improvements.

Enhanced Problem-Solving

Regular exposure to failure builds pattern recognition for what goes wrong and why.

This creates intuitive understanding of common failure modes and their solutions, making you more effective at helping others navigate similar challenges.

Psychological Resilience

Perhaps most importantly, comfort with failure builds psychological resilience that serves you across all domains of life.

When you know you can survive and learn from setbacks, you become more willing to pursue ambitious goals and less devastated when things don’t go according to plan.

The Anti-Fragile Life

The ultimate goal isn’t to seek failure for its own sake, but to build what Taleb calls “anti-fragility”—the capacity to get stronger under stress rather than merely surviving it.

This requires viewing failure not as evidence of inadequacy but as raw material for development.

My BJJ journey exemplifies this process.

Two years of getting consistently beaten didn’t make me weaker or more discouraged—it made me more resilient, more realistic about development timelines, and more appreciative of small improvements.

The failures weren’t obstacles to overcome but building blocks for capability.

This perspective transforms how you approach challenges across all areas of life:

• Career setbacks become learning opportunities.
• Relationship conflicts become chances to develop better communication skills.
• Financial mistakes become education in risk management and decision-making.

Embracing Failure on October 13th

Finland’s Day of Failure represents more than cultural curiosity—it’s a necessary corrective to our failure-phobic culture.

In a rapidly changing world where the ability to adapt and learn becomes more valuable than existing knowledge, comfort with failure becomes a crucial competitive advantage.

Whether you’re 60 years old learning BJJ, starting a new career, or developing any complex skill, the principle remains the same: embrace failure as your most important teacher.

Don’t seek it recklessly, but don’t avoid it fearfully.

Create systems for learning from setbacks, document the lessons, and share them with others.

My blue belt represents two years of systematic failure and learning.

I still get beaten regularly by people better than me, and I expect that to continue for years, hopefully decades, to come.

But each failure teaches me something new, builds my resilience a little more, and moves me incrementally toward greater competence.

This October 13th, consider celebrating your failures alongside your successes.

Not because failure is inherently good, but because learning from failure is the foundation of everything genuinely good that follows.

In a world full of people avoiding discomfort and seeking easy wins, those who embrace productive failure will always have a profound advantage.

The choice is simple: you can join the ranks of the failure-phobic and remain perpetually stuck at beginner levels, or you can adopt the Finnish wisdom and use failure as fuel for continuous growth.

Your future self will thank you for choosing the harder path.

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